January 12, 2017
(Last Updated: January 18, 2017 @ 12:05pm PT)
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
PENSACOLA, Florida – Wearable technology has become increasingly popular, helping consumers gather data on health and productivity in order to achieve fitness and wellness goals.
But wearable technology is more than simply popular consumer goods like Fitbits or Apple Watches. Multiple companies have developed wearable devices to help administer doses of medication, such as Unilife ’s injectable devices for the delivery of its large and small volume products.
Florida-based ActiGraph has carved out its own niche in the wearable devices field, focusing on chronic disease and how their treatments affect activity and sleep behaviors. For 12 years ActiGraph has been a leader in the field of clinical-¬grade wearables and gathering big data in an effort to help researchers understand how the sleep of patients dealing with various diseases, including COPD and cancer is affected. As an example, the devices the company develops looks at how activity and sleep levels have affected diseases and how the diseases have in turn affected sleep.
“We were doing this a long time before the idea of wearables were cool,” Jeremy Wyatt, ActiGraph’s chief technical officer said in an interview with BioSpace. Said research centers are trying to understand how patients are dealing with sleep
But, it’s more than just manufacturing of a reliable device. ActiGraph’s technology also collects large amounts of data from patients wearing the devices
Wyatt said the company has developed a reliable reputation in the industry. As an example, he said ActiGraph is involved in a 20 year-long holistic health study in Germany. The company was chosen, in part, due to the reliability of its tech devices and hardware and software programs.
ActiGraph has relationships in 85 different countries, but about half of its business is in the United States. Most of the company’s clients have been in academia, working with research institutes like Johns Hopkins, MD Anderson and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, but in recent years, ActiGraph has been forging relationships with large pharmaceutical companies.
Wyatt said ActiGraph’s products provide a high-level overview of patient activity, but also collects large amounts of peripheral data that allows researchers to “dive in and get more out of the product.”
The patients participating in the study take the devices and wear them at home so they are in a more natural environment, Wyatt said. Being in a personal environment, as opposed to going to a sleep center, can provide for more accurate data.
The company has developed several different programs and devices to help gather the data for researchers. In November ActiGraph unveiled its latest offering, the CentrePoint Solutions, which enables company clients to leverage ActiGraph’s hardware and software tools in the development of proprietary remote patient monitoring (RPM) systems and other home healthcare delivery solutions.
ActiGraph started development of CentrePoint in 2013 after working with its big pharma partners. Wyatt said they realized the typical desktop software they had been using it would soon be out-of-date and overloaded, so they developed CentrePoint, a cloud-based solution that could be used in a global pharma environment. The new CentrePoint Solutions tech simplifies the data collection and dissemination process, he said. He said this allows data to be collected over a cellular network, which provides researchers with a broader, yet more precise view of patient data. This gives real world evidence and leads into the precision medicine movement, he said.
“We don’t see ourselves as a device company, we are a solutions company,” Wyatt said. “We’ve always brought the big data piece to offer more precision in order to provide objective feedback.”
The CentrePoint Solutions will be a central focus of ActiGraph’s growth in 2017. Wyatt said the first part of the year will be spent introducing the product to their partner firms and sponsors and letting them know how the new technology “simplifies the workflow and improves the feedback they get from the product.”
“We want to see the growth of the product and show our clients how they can respond faster as it (CentrePoint) cuts down on logistic concern,” Wyatt said.
2017 will also bring about some upgrades, including “real-time triggers” built into the platform. Wyatt added the company will also expand its cloud storage capacity as well as its technological infrastructure.
Throughout 2016 ActiGraph saw significant growth and Wyatt said more is sure to come. Although he had no specifics, Wyatt said he believes the company will expand its physical footprint in Pensacola, as the company has grown significantly. Some of that growth was in its quality control department, which Wyatt said has grown in “leaps and bounds,” which includes FDA clearance of its devices. The growth has been strong enough that the company had to hire additional staff for documentation and auditing purposes. Wyatt said.
