BACKGROUND

Hello! My name is Pat Lockhart. I am the co-founder of UltimateDatawatch and I am a recovering alcoholic. Those two points are intimately connected if I may explain.

The uncomfortable fact is, I used to relapse quite a bit, and I was always trying to figure out ways to stop that. One of few ways I saw that was successful was when alcoholics used an alcohol ankle bracelet.

Whenever I saw people wearing ankle bracelets, like everybody else I knew they were court mandated for a legal offense. I always thought that embarrassing drunks that way was part of the punishment. But putting the stigma aside, I thought for the most part they worked. I never saw anybody drinking with one on, because if they did drink they knew that the ankle device would detect the relapse and they would violate their probation – a strong incentive not to relapse.

I knew I needed serious help with my own drinking so I went to the local ankle bracelet distributor and asked for one, but they didn’t have the paperwork for a non-court mandated person. They had over 1000 bracelets on people in my city at the time, but zero on voluntary wearers. Ultimately we scratched out some paperwork, and they gave me one. So for $450 per month I had a bulky, conspicuous device that only detected alcohol. It was also old analogue technology, so it only reported only when I came home and only through a landline system.

I had the device set up to call my wife since I was more scared of her than any probation officer and for the four months I wore that ankle bracelet I never touched a drop. The thought that my dear wife would know with hard facts that I was started drinking again even though I lied about it all the time, kept me from ever taking that first drink. It wasn’t complicated – it just worked. There’s no other way to explain it.

During those four months everybody I saw thought I was wearing a court mandated ankle bracelet for a legal offense. It sticks out and has a strong stigma attached, it is awkward and uncomfortable, and it’s embarrassing and intimidating. I gave up explaining why I had it on and just wore the damn thing, because it worked for me.

The Original UDW Technology Platform

But I also thought – there’s got to be a better system that would do more and not look like you are being monitored at all.  I started doing research and began investing in developing new technology for a wearable device to monitor alcoholic behavior. We branched out into drug addiction and several other areas of research and began working on sensors and software.

During that time we also did parallel development on a user-friendly approach for our device interface to collect and display sensor data. This user friendly UX for clinicians, providers and patients has now evolved into the unique user-friendly, data-rich UDW interface.

The bottom line is that after devoting 2017-2019 and considerable investment to developing our own proprietary technology, including a few prototypes, we finally figured out that we couldn’t build the watch for less than a few million dollars. Our partner and technology advisor Dr. Shreyas Narsipur, currently a NASA consulting engineer, also designed, built, and successfully tested a wrist-worn wearable “watch” prototype for alcohol detection and reporting in 2015.

So bottom line after extensive due diligence and close to $350,000 in time and cash invested, we decided that developing our own technology was not the right path forward.

During that same time, 2017-2020 the Apple Watch, which we had been looking at all along, grew its healthcare technology exponentially in sensor readability and we discovered that the information that it could deliver was 90% of what we needed at that time. (It now delivers 96% of what we need to support our selected use cases!)

Based on our discussions with Apple as a registered Apple developer, we decided to redirect our whole development effort into using and adapting existing Apple and Android watches as our technology platforms. The UDW system now uses either platform and also pulls data from other non-wearable devices. This strategy also gives UDW-wearing patients no-cost access to tech support provided by device manufacturers.

Pulling and integrating real-time and historical data from one or more wearable/non-wearable devices 20/24 hours/365 (leaving time for charging the watch) gives the physician/provider actionable accurate information on their patients unobtainable any other way.

THE UDW USE CASES

While working on the use cases for alcoholism, obesity, and diabetes we also talked with many primary care doctors who looked at our interface and said things like “We want this now, because it looks like you have made the technology simple and useful”.

Primary care physicians may actually benefit more from the UDW system than medical specialists. PCPs are in the best position to spot the early development of chronic diseases. The primary care doctor can also maintain a relationship with that patient during the early stages of their need for critical care and then they may have to be turned over to an specialist but when that becomes necessary the specialist will benefit greatly from the detailed information that will be part of the patients UDW digital health records.

The research cited in the Use Case pages below demonstrate 100% that better data more usefully displayed leads to better provider decisions and greater patient self-awareness, creating far better outcomes with real, stable behavioral changes which are the main goal of the UDW system. The “Use Case” data also show validated current costs and projected savings in some of UDW’s most important applications – addiction, alcoholism, obesity, diabetes, and primary care medicine, among over 20 additional applications.

We demonstrate that there are several areas of major cost savings available throughout the medical system with UDW.

Time savings with UDW alone have a major impact on medical costs:

Providers spend less time before a visit gathering data, less time during the visit asking for data from the patient, and less time following a visit inputting data.

Patients spend less time providing data before, during and after the visit and less time trying to convey their symptoms to the provider during the visit.

Patients receive follow-up and support messages customized for their individual needs without time-consuming and costly physician input.

The peer-reviewed research behind these Use Case studies demonstrates how these verifiable time savings translate directly into major cost savings for the UDW system.

However, it is more than just interesting to note that every research study we reviewed was based on old, limited Telehealth, mHealth, RPM, and Virtual Health technologies.

UDW will empower doctors to transition from a “best guest” scenario based on seeing the patient once or twice a year to a “data rich” environment where real-time patient data is available 24/7 and there is two-way communication available anytime a critical or even suggestive data event occurs.

The “Use Cases” below demonstrate how extensive, gold-standard published research supports our projections for cost and time savings along with other important benefits, like reduced physician burnout over patient load and EHR tasks. As UDW moves into patient populations and user data becomes available we are confident that the reduced costs, time savings, and improved outcomes will become obvious and irresistible to physicians, patients, and health care systems alike.