The work carried out is innovative and the new design for the vaginal probe and the games lead to innovative aspects on their development, beyond the state of the art of current alternatives for self-training of pelvic floor muscles, which mainly rely on pressure sensors and simple feedback such as vibration or audio messages. This does not allow to assess that proper training of the pelvic floor is being carried out (without involving other muscles that may even worsen the condition of the pelvic floor) nor it does engage the patients to follow a training plan encouraging self-treatment and self-improvement.
This kind of approach for urinary incontinence management and treatment supposes an innovative breakthrough, helping patients manage their training, receiving inputs on lifestyle interventions, and finding motivation to follow the exercise plan through various forms of interaction with other patients and therapists. Moreover, the clinical trials will provide the necessary evidence to assess the increased adherence to the treatment using serious gaming, biofeedback, lifestyle support, and self-management.
The WOMEN-UP system with CE mark as medical device enables remote monitoring of PFMT treatment, which facilitated insight in training results and enabled therapist to objectively monitor adherence to the treatment. This is especially important, since adherence has been identied as an important predictor of overall PFMT efficacy and treatment supervision is a key point to achieve improvement in PFMT: women receiving regular supervision are more likely to report improvement than women doing PFMT with little or no supervision. In addition, a decrease up to 35% has been estimated in the budget impact thanks to the new WOMEN-UP system.
Consequentlym, results demonstrated Improvement of UI symptoms similar to the usual care, potential economic savings as estimated in the cost-analysis, considerable time savings for patients, following from less travels associated with fewer visits to their (uro) therapists. These time savings represent opportunity costs, as patients may use this time for many other valuable activities.
Summarizing, Women-Up treatment model has clinical benefit for patients, this increases flexibility and autonomy, in combination with more entertaining approach to PFMT exercises as well as substantial time savings makes the Women-Up self-management solution an attractive alternative to usual care PFMT as currently offered for UI.
The eHealth solution developed in the WOMEN-UP project provides a personalised solution for self-treatment (with medical supervision) and leads to exploitable results, delivering innovation to the market.
