Proteus Discover is a unique health monitoring system that involves an ingestible sensor, a small wearable patch, and a mobile app. Here’s our Proteus Discover review.
What is Proteus Discover?
Proteus Discover is a health tracking system that requires you to swallow a sensor the size of a grain of sand. Then, you wear a sensor patch and use the mobile application to track data from these sensors.
Proteus Discover is made by a Redwood City, California-based company. It’s designed to help doctors and caregivers gain greater health insights into their patients. This isn’t some trendy wearable device you use to track your exercise or sleep habits: this is a medical device designed to improve patient care in hospital settings.
The Proteus Discover system gives patients and doctors unique health data that you would not typically be able to access. By taking data from inside the body, and combining that with data collected from the wearable sensor, the Proteus Discover system aims to improve patient care. The goal is to not only give doctors the information they need, but also to give patients better information about the treatments currently underway.
How Does Proteus Discover Work?
There are three main parts of the Proteus Discover platform, including the ingestible sensors, a small wearable sensor patch, and the mobile app.
Essentially, you swallow a pill that contains a sensor inside. Your stomach digests the pill, then the sensor – which is the size of a grain of sand – starts to transmit information from inside your body.
By doing this, the system “unlocks never-before-seen insight into patient health patterns and medication treatment effectiveness, leading to more informed healthcare decisions for everyone involved”, explains the official website.
The Pill
The Proteus Discover pill combines high-volume semiconductor technology with pharmaceutical technology. The pill, according to the website, is “made of elements found in a typical diet and has been approved for marketing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and CE marked in Europe”.
The Patch
The patch is a wearable skin patch that contains an FDA-approved sensor. The sensor tracks things like the medication you’re taking as well as your activity – including your steps – and your heart rate – either resting or while active.
The App
The Discover App helps patients monitor all of the information coming in through the sensors. You can view information like your medications, steps, activity, rest, heart rate, blood pressure, and weight. Use the app to setup multiple medication-taking schedules or to receive medication reminders.
Benefits of the Proteus Discover System
The Proteus Discover system is designed to improve every aspect of the healthcare system, including the insight patients get into their own health and the information doctors can access in order to make informed decisions.
- Some of the key advertised benefits of Proteus Discover for patients include:
- Provides visibility into medication-taking patterns
- Increases connectivity to the patient’s care team
- Allows for more relevant conversations with healthcare providers
- Makes doctor visits more productive
Ultimately, the goal of Proteus Discover is to put patients in control of their health. You can get a better understanding of how doctors are treating you, why they’re treating you like that, and what the outcome of that treatment is expected to be.
The biggest benefits for Proteus Discover are seen in high-risk populations. The makers of the Proteus Discover platform cite a recent study where patients with uncontrolled hypertension and diabetes used the Proteus Discover system. These patients achieved a significantly greater reduction in blood pressure and LDL cholesterol, and were more likely to achieve their blood pressure goals than the team without Proteus Discover.
Meanwhile, healthcare professionals enjoy benefits like:
- Quickly decode patterns around medication adherence and patient behaviors
- Make objective decisions about when to initiate, titrate, and eliminate medicine
- Optimize treatment therapies and get patients to their goals more quickly
- Engage in richer, more meaningful conversations with patients based on clear, objective data
Overall, Proteus Discover is designed to make both ends of the healthcare system – patients and doctors – more efficient by providing them with information they cannot typically access.
Who Makes Proteus Discover?
Proteus Discover is made by a company called Proteus Digital Health, Inc.
That company is based at the following address:
2600 Bridge Parkway
Redwood City, CA 94065
You can contact the company by phone at 1-650-632-4031. Proteus Digital Health, Inc. was founded in 2001 with the goal of combining modern technology with medicine.
As the company’s LinkedIn profile explains, “The goal of digital medicines is to empower patients and their families, enable physicians and health systems to more effectively manage risk and ensure that outcomes are reliably achieved.”
To learn more about the Proteus Discover system, talk to your doctor today. Or, visit the official Proteus Digital Health website at http://www.proteus.com/
