Digital Health – a vision comes to life

Prof. Dr. Sven Hirsch, Director ZHAW Digital Health Lab

Programm DigiSanté – Stand der Dinge

Gian-Reto Grond, Bundesamt für Gesundheit BAG

• DigiSanté is the federal programme to promote digital transformation in the healthcare sector. It is being developed by the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) and the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) in an initialisation phase until the end of 2024 and then implemented by the end of 2034.
• The DigiSanté programme management will now continue to work intensively in the initialisation phase, which runs until the end of 2024.
• The presentation outlines the initial situation and the status of the work.

Bridging Lived Experience and Innovation in Rehabilitation Robotics

Prof. Dr. Roger Gassert, ETH Zurich, Department of Health Sciences and Technology

Robot-assisted sensorimotor therapy following neurological injury holds significant potential to enhance conventional approaches by enabling earlier, more varied, and intensive treatment. This approach can alleviate the workload on therapists and provide sophisticated assessments through integrated measures. Despite these advantages, the robotic systems currently used in clinical settings are often complex and difficult to use, necessitating trained therapists for setup and supervision, which limits their overall impact. Drawing on my experiences as both a researcher and a patient who underwent seven months of intensive neurorehabilitation, I will discuss these challenges. I will also highlight our efforts to fully realize the benefits of robot-assisted therapy across the continuum of care, aiming to substantially increase the therapy dose available to patients.

The role of digital biomarkers in evidence generation –  development, use and value

Dr. Guy Bogaarts, Digital Biomarkers Solutions Manager, Roche Diagnostics

Before a new drug can be released on the market, pharmaceutical companies have to run clinical trials to provide evidence that the drug leads to an improvement in how patients feel, function, or survive. This is typically assessed by biomarkers and clinical outcome assessments collected infrequently during hospital visits. Over the last decade, Roche has pioneered the development of novel ways of measuring biomarkers and clinical outcomes using smart-phones and -watches. These so-called digital biomarkers may provide more objective, sensitive, real-world measures of disease progression which may ultimately lead to shorter and smaller trials. However, before these new digital biomarkers can be widely used and accepted by health authorities, we also need to provide evidence that the technology we use is fit for purpose, that we measure accurately what we claim we measure, and that what we measure is clinically relevant. We at Roche are currently working on this evidence generation and making our internally developed digital biomarkers available to other pharmaceutical companies and research institutions.