POOLE Hospital is part of a new wearable tech initiative designed to help cut the shocking rise in deaths of people with epilepsy and save £250 million a year.

Research shows there has been a 70 per cent rise in deaths from the neurological condition between 2001 and 2014, bringing calls for better clinical management of patients who make up three per cent of all A&E visits.

Poole, working in a consortium which includes the University of Kent, the Care Alliance and various tech firms, is equipping people with the ability to self-manage their condition through the successful myCareCentric Epilepsy programme.

“This approach has the potential to revolutionise the management of epilepsy by optimising the use of currently available treatments,” said Dr Rupert Page, Consultant Neurologist at Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. "The timely, expert support that can be provided through this solution helps patients manage their own condition and restores to them some of the control that the diagnosis of epilepsy all too often takes away.”

Now the consortium is urging hospitals and the government to consider new investment in the treatment which they say could reduce cost pressures on the NHS by as much as £250 million a year.

Running on Microsoft's cloud platform Azure, the programme provides patients with wearable technology that records vital health data, helping clinicians build a tailored record of a patient's condition and seizure patterns. It has the potential to learn to classify seizures, alert clinicians and carers in real-time so they can consult patients remotely, and provide essential lifestyle recommendations and drug prescriptions.

Dr Jon Shaw, Director of Clinical Strategy at consortium member System C & Graphnet Care Alliance said: “What’s really exciting about this is that it’s a ‘first of type’ project that combines smart wearables, patient-facing applications and enterprise communication technology which gets messages out to the care team in real time."

He said that since its launch, myCareCentric Epilepsy had seen strong results, including a three-week reduction in response to seizure notification time and 30 per cent fewer admissions to hospital.

With one in 100 people in the UK believed to be suffering from epilepsy, leading to three per cent of all Accident and Emergency visits and a total of 1.3 million days in hospital a year, the team are looking to expand the programme to more volunteers to provide the data they need to self-manage and understand epilepsy.

Simon Wigglesworth, of Epilepsy Action praised the innovation. "It's fantastic to see the success of the myCareCentric Epilepsy programme and the potential for life-changing outcomes it's driving for patients," he said.