News

Intel investing heavily in research on future healthcare

17 June 2008

Intel is making a substantial investment in developing technologies that will enable “a new model of healthcare that is personal and distributed” to help deal with the time bomb of an ageing and chronic-disease suffering population worldwide.

About twenty healthcare-related projects were on show at the Research at Intel Day 2008 held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California last week. These were just some of over 70 projects and concepts on show that are underway in its labs in the areas of faster computing, low energy computing, visual computing, wireless technologies, future healthcare needs and more. The company invests $6 billion in research annually in its numerous research departments and in collaborations with universities, governments, companies and other organisations.

As a major user of standard information technology (the UK NHS is Europe's largest buyer of information technology), many of these other projects will also have a large impact on healthcare both directly and indirectly. These include massively increased computing power for uses such as genetic analysis and visual computing. Technology for mobile working will be impacted by lower energy usage in microprocessors and wireless system, and by several projects aimed at improving wireless communications and linking of mobile devices.

Chief Technology Officer and Senior Fellow Justin Rattner outlined how the Company's research investments will impact technology coming in the next five years, reshaping how people interact with computers and improve the environment.

Rattner also said the company’s priority of investing in research helps shape Intel’s products and the industry at-large. For example, the dawn of the low power Intel Atom processor stemmed from a small project inside Intel’s labs called 'Snocone' that explored the feasibility of designing an ultra-low-power processor based on Intel architecture. Several technologies inside the company’s Intel vPro processor technology for business platforms came from the labs as did 1990s research that helped create the Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection to the PC for music players, keyboards, video cameras and more.

“Hundreds of researchers inside Intel, and our close work with other technology companies, scientists, universities and governments will bring dramatic change over the next five years,” Rattner said.

The major driver for Intel's research into healthcare is the ageing population worldwide, in which the proportion of people over 60 is expected to double to 21% by 2050. With costs of healthcare for this group three to five times greater than younger age groups, the burden on healthcare services will be unsustainable unless there are revolutionary changes in the way it is provided. Information technology will have a significant role in bringing about these changes.

Intel has conducted large numbers of ethnographic studies worldwide since 1999, to understand and identify the major challenges in every aspect of healthcare and direct the research efforts.

A major focus of Intel's healthcare research is the needs of older adults, their clinicians and care providers. The Global Aging Experience Project is a multi-year, multi-national project to study the effects of ageing populations on health and well being and identify areas where technology could help manage the changes. The project identified eight key areas of need in which technology could play a role: making a person's living space more appealing and creating a greater sense of well-being; enhancing safety; supporting cognition; aiding physical activities; bringing healthcare to the home; helping to find suitable care; enabling social interaction; and maintaining a meaningful and useful life.

In 2007, Intel, jointly with the Industrial Development Agency Ireland, invested $30m in the Technology Research for Independent Living Centre (TRIL). The Centre is studying the physical, cognitive and social consequences of ageing, and is developing new technologies to support older people who want to live independently. The first results of the Centre's research were on display. These include real-time gait analysis that detects postural and neuro-cardiovascular instability in older people and BioMobius, an open, shareable technology research platform with an easy-to-use graphical development environment.

A home-based test for Parkinson’s disease uses small sensors placed on the patients and guides them through a series of six motor and tremor assessments. This will allow more frequent monitoring of a patient's condition and provide data that could be used to improve diagnosis and drug strategies. Intel has also formed a consortium with the Alzheimer's Association to study ways that technology could help people with Alzheimer's disease.

The Technology for Long-term Care project is evaluating a system that can monitor the activity of an older person using small sensors placed on every-day objects such as cutlery, cereal boxes, jugs, plates, toothbrushes etc. The sensors are based on standard RFID tags, so are cheap and readily available. The system can track the movement of the household objects and determine normal behaviour of use. It can then detect when there is a change in behaviour and then, for example, send a message to a carer who can check on the person.

Technology for long-term care: sensors placed on household items
can monitor their normal usage and alert when there are changes in behaviour

Clinical applications include the bioelectronic chip for point-of-care testing and data delivery, and also laboratory testing. This is a hybrid silicon chip composed of a silicon-based field-effect device coated with biological macromolecules. The biological molecules are based on those used in existing medical tests, such as the PSA test used to determine presence of prostate cancer (though not considered a very accurate test in the UK). When the chip is exposed to a patient's sample (eg blood, urine) that contains the disease indicator molecule the test is looking for, this molecule binds to the chip which generates electrical signals that can be recorded and analysed. Researchers say the bioelectronic chips are sensitive, stable and affordable. They are being integrated with advanced sensors and microelectronics for use in testing and research (see below).

The bioelectronic chip (top left) and examples of the chip
integrated with electronics for sample testing.

A project conducted in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has developed a system that can help doctors diagnose and treat skin lesions. The Interactive Search Assisted Decision Support in Dermatology project has developed a database that allows doctors to search for lesions based on critical criteria (eg diameter, colour, asymmetry, texture). The doctor can then compare similar lesions from the database to that of a patient and consider the pathology results of each before making a decision about treatment. The larger the database of images, the better the tool will be, so the project would benefit from adding other collections of images.

A screenshot of the dermatology decision-support tool.

These are brief summaries of just some of the projects that are investigating how information technology can benefit healthcare and help address the looming healthcare crisis. bjhc&im will be reporting on more of the projects in the coming weeks.

Coincidentally, the costs of healthcare in the US made the local news while the show was on. US healthcare costs have risen over 90% in the last few years and the number of people who cannot afford healthcare is rapidly rising. There are 75 million people who have no insurance or are under insured. Increasing numbers of middle classes with insurance are finding themselves with crippling debt because it doesn't cover all their healthcare costs. They have found that their insurance policies don't cover existing conditions such as chronic diseases (the areas that need more healthcare), cover fewer health problems and have capped pay-outs. This has resulted in more people having to take out loans, having credit card debt and remortgaging their houses.

The healthcare time bomb in the US may be exploding earlier than anyone expected and will have huge consequences for the whole economy — and the world's — at a time when it is already suffering from the subprime mortgage crisis.

To top^