"Smart soles" help patients recover from a broken hip
By Julie Robert,
Hip fractures are one of the most common injuries sustained by the elderly population following a fall.
This often results in a number of complications, and many patients never fully recover. A team from the Research Institute of the Â鶹AV Health Centre (RI-MUHC) led by clinician scientist Dr. Suzanne Morin, in partnership with Greybox Solutions Inc., decided to tackle this problem by developing a rehabilitation and e-learning program using a "smart" shoe sole which connects to a tablet to provide remote monitoring and coaching. This technology will guide patients healing from hip fractures and their families through the recovery period at home.
Their project, called HIP@HOME, is one of 22 innovative eHealth projects from across the country supporting mental health and youth and seniors with complex care needs which received a total of $13.8M from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) eHealth Innovation Partnership Program (eHIPP). The funding was announced today by the Minister of Health, Jane Philpott, and the Minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development, Navdeep Bains.
“I am delighted that our program was selected as one of the top Canadian research projects designed to empower patients and enable better health care,” says Dr. Morin who is an associate professor of the Department of Medicine at Â鶹AV. “It’s an exciting and challenging study that we hope will lead to improving patient experience and outcomes in terms of autonomy following hip fracture and possibly contribute to lower healthcare system costs.”
Intelligent soles help patients reach exercise goals
The research team, who received a $648,239 grant over four years from the CIHR, will work in partnership with the RI-MUHC and  Greybox Solutions Inc. – a Montreal based company that specializes in healthcare technologies – to develop an intelligent sole for shoes that will measure the speed, number of steps, distance or exercise performed by patients during their rehabilitation period. All the data will be remotely collected through a program available on electronic tablets. The research team will then be able to coach patients in self-management and remotely monitor their health status. Patient recruitment will start in the coming months.
 “Innovation in biomedicine is one of the pillars of the RI-MUHC, as is perfectly illustrated by the project developed by Dr. Morin’s team,” says Dr. Vassilios Papadopoulos, Executive Director and Chief Scientific Officer of the RI-MUHC and Associate Executive Director for Research of the MUHC. “I believe, as a multidisciplinary team, they will certainly achieve their goals of improving health outcomes for our aging population.”
Delivered by the CIHR, eHIPP was developed in partnership with the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) to stimulate collaborations between health researchers and Canadian innovative technology companies. By bringing academia and industry together, eHIPP is ensuring that eHealth innovations are being co-developed, tested with the people who will need them and evaluated for their cost-effectiveness.
The team led by Dr. Morin includes co-investigators Nancy Mayo and Edward Harvey (RI-MUHC); Sonia Jean (Institut National de Santé Publique du Québec), and collaborators, Ronald Ludman (CSSS Cavendish); Etienne Belzile (Université Laval);Pierre Guy (University of British Columbia); Lauren Beaupre (University of Alberta); Susan Jaglal (University of Toronto); Rhona McGlasson (Bone and Joint Canada); and Brenda Macgibbon (UQAM).
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About the RI-MUHC
The Research Institute of the Â鶹AV Health Centre (RI-MUHC) is a world-renowned biomedical and healthcare research centre. The Institute, which is affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine of Â鶹AV, is the research arm of the Â鶹AV Health Centre (MUHC) – an academic health centre located in Montreal, Canada, that has a mandate to focus on complex care within its community. The RI-MUHC supports over 460 researchers and close to 1,300 research trainees devoted to a broad spectrum of fundamental, clinical and health outcomes research at the Glen and the Montreal General Hospital sites of the MUHC. Its research facilities offer a dynamic multidisciplinary environment that fosters collaboration and leverages discovery aimed at improving the health of individual patients across their lifespan. The RI-MUHC is supported in part by the Fonds de recherche du QuĂ©bec – SantĂ© (FRQS).Â
