More than 1.5 million Canadians are living with frailty, with that number expected to grow by 33 per cent over the next five years.

As older patients grow increasingly frail, they are unable to handle many daily tasks, leading to a need for elevated care, admission to long-term care homes or hospitalization. The centralization of healthcare delivery within acute care facilities is increasingly costly, amounting to $125B in Canada.

In response, Indoc Research and its subsidiary Greenroom Research together with project lead XCO and other academic and technology partners are developing a frailty care system (FCS) to help frail individuals remain safely in their homes and provide them with essential support.

Until now, frailty assessment measures have been too disparate or imprecise to offer definitive treatment, management and monitoring plans. The FCS offers a unique assessment, treatment and patient engagement portal for the management of frail patients. It brings together an array of data from wearable sensors and electronic medical records onto one platform from which a physician or caregiver can gain a clearer view of a patient’s status and progress. Combined with extensive care management software and patient engagement applications, the FCS will be the first end-to-end solution for predicting, assessing, monitoring, stabilizing and slowing frailty among Canada’s aging citizens.

The work on this project has been supported by a Digital Technology Supercluster co-investment.