Medasense has been awarded a development grant to extend the application of its NOL pain response monitoring index for noncommunicating dementia patients.
The development project, supported by an Israel Innovation Authority grant, will be conducted in collaboration with the Dorot Rehabilitation and Geriatric Medical Center in Netanya, Israel.
According to the World Health Organization, there are some 50 million people living with dementia worldwide, and 10 million new cases every year. The condition is one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people.
People with severe dementia are unable to communicate their pain. Practitioners and caregivers have long been assessing pain in dementia patients using subjective indicators, such as restlessness, agitation, facial expression, moaning, altered respiration or behavioural changes. However, these indicators fail to be specific enough to know how much pain the person is experiencing and to identify the correct form of medication to relieve their suffering.
Medasense’s NOL technology enables clinicians to optimize and personalize pain control and avoid overmedication. NOL is a unique technology that applies a non-invasive sensing platform and an artificial intelligence algorithm to objectively monitor and quantify the individual patient’s pain response. The technology is a known solution in operating rooms, where it helps surgical teams manage pain medication during surgery, when the patient is under anaesthesia. With the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) grant, Medasense will now be extending its NOL pain index solution for the treatment of dementia patients.
“We are excited to be part of this pilot project with Medasense”, said Dr. Ady Sasson, Deputy Director of Dorot. “As one of the largest geriatric centres in Israel, the objective and specific pain response monitoring that Medasense’s NOL scale enables will allow us to significantly improve quality of care for our patients every day. “We want to make sure that we are providing our patients with individually tailored pain control: we don’t want to be giving pain medication when it may not be necessary and we don’t want to be undertreating pain. Until now we haven’t had the tools to be able to know,” he explained.
“This development grant will enable Medasense to provide tools that can help reduce suffering for dementia patients and help make sure these patients are being given optimized treatment,” said Galit Zuckerman-Stark, Medasense’s CEO and founder. We are very honoured to be collaborating with the team at Dorot, who are truly motivated to improve pain care and patient outcomes. We have already proven the value of our technology for pain management (nociception monitoring) in surgical settings where patients are unable to communicate under general anaesthesia. This project, supported by the Israeli Innovation Authority and the Ministry of Health, is a welcome opportunity to make a significant impact on patients in additional settings.”