During the first year of the project, the DyCare team together with the advisory board experts and external collaborations, worked to meet all the milestones and have a final version of ReHub for the clinical studies. User experience and algorithms have been updated according to the feedback collected during the validations phases in collaborating centres and experts of the sector. On the other hand, new versions of the sensor and the Exercise Kit have been designed, prototyped, tested, certified and finalized as a reference document for manufacturing plan and industrialisation. For the clinical studies, together with the CRO, the principal investigators of the hospital teams and the DyCare team, study protocols for two pathologies of total knee arthroplasty (TKA) and total hip arthroplasty (THA) have been developed and approved by Ethics Committees.
In DyCare, we have put a lot of effort into dissemination and communication tasks as it is crucial to reach out to an increased number of interesting audiences, inform and reach out to the sector demonstrating the benefits of our digital health solution and open the (new) markets for our products. Some of the realised activities are branding, designing a new interactive website, a specific logo for the solution, publishing newsletters, flyers, posters, active presence/participation in the important fair trades, congresses, workshops and social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. DyCare’s business development team with the leadership of the CEO approached the key opinion leaders, policymakers, health sector main players, clinicians, specialists and other related professionals to disseminate the project and raise interests in our product. Through these activities, we have been able to secure various collaboration agreements with different entities for running demos, clinical sessions, pilot projects and other forms of collaboration. Among these entities, there are research centres, hospitals, insurance companies, sport study centres and sports clubs.
Given the importance of the protection of intellectual property (IP) and patents for SMEs, DyCare has dedicated a significant effort to IP. In particular, a Patent Cooperation Treaty application and a Utility Model have been submitted.
In the second reporting period, the main focus of the activities was on the clinical studies as the protocols have been approved by the ethical committees of both hospitals and started the recruitment and implementation of the protocol. Technical and management support has been provided to the CRO and hospitals to tackle the possible problems or burdens and make the studies running smoothly. Meanwhile, we have also worked on improvements, optimization and troubleshooting of different pillars of ReHub including algorithms, front and backend, hardware, firmware, etc. We have also continued with our dissemination activities and scientific publications to spread the word and impacts of ReHub among the community and target markets. From the IPR point of view, we have filed patent applications in EPO and USPTO as a part of our PCT nationalisation phase procedure.
The last Reporting Period of the project implementation period coincided with the COVID19 Pandemic. ReHub project like many other projects and companies worldwide has been affected by the consequences of this Pandemic, the clinical studies among the most affected parts of the project. The patient recruitment process of the studies has stopped due to the lockdowns in Spain and Italy and progressed slowly after that. However, the Pandemic has propelled the rapid adoption of technology to deliver patient care while practising physical distancing. The special pandemic situation has helped identify the weaknesses in the healthcare system’s response and offer continuous outpatient rehabilitation to avoid infections while the epidemic lasts. In the case of rehabilitation, while preventing community transmission of the Coronavirus infection, social distancing measures have represented a barrier for rehabilitation, commonly performed face-to-face, and put a strain on rehabilitation services. As a result of the urgent demands of the sector, we have finalized various agreements such as with DKV España (one of the biggest health insurance companies in Spain, >1400 affiliated centres), with 4 important hospitals in Spain, Vital&Clinic in Spain, Top Fisio Clinic in Rome- Italy, STAH: Swiss Therapy At Home, in Switzerland -among others- to implement ReHub in their rehabilitation services.
