Home health technology can help patients monitor and manage their health without needing to visit a hospital, but sometimes it’s hard to know if that tech is safe and effective.
Nurse Technology Enhanced Care at Home (NTECH), a lab at Washington State University formed by a group of nurse scientists in 2023, works on improving health care for people with chronic conditions by testing and developing home health technologies, including some that use AI.
In the United States, treating chronic diseases costs about $1.1 trillion each year. Some of the most expensive conditions include heart failure, kidney disease, neurological disorders, and dementias. Technologies like fall detection sensors, wearable devices that track vital signs, and mobile apps for managing chronic diseases can help.
Even simple innovations like disposable bed sheets and bidets can make a difference.
Shelly Fritz, who cofounded NTECH as an associate professor of nursing at WSU, explains that while organizations like Consumer Reports and AARP test products, there isn’t a place that evaluates health technologies from a nursing perspective. NTECH can test off-the-shelf products and give those that perform well a “nursing seal of approval” to assist patients and find the best technologies for their needs.
The WSU College of Nursing team is now led by Professor Catherine Van Son. She cofounded NTECH with Fritz, Professor Julie Postma, and Associate Professors Connie Nguyen-Truong and Marian Wilson. Fritz, now at the University of California, Davis, continues to work with the team as affiliated faculty.
Besides testing existing products, WSU nurse scientists work on creating new technologies to address gaps in chronic disease management. Their combined expertise covers areas like smart home technologies, mobile health apps, chronic pain management, gerontology, and health technology adoption in underrepresented communities. They plan to collaborate with experts from other fields, such as computer science and engineering, but the lab will remain nurse-driven.
The rapid rise of machine learning and AI in health care also requires attention. “The inclusion of nursing knowledge and expertise has been sparse when we think about the development and implementation of AI for delivering health care—yet our disciplinary knowledge and skills are critical to improving patient outcomes,” Fritz says.
To that end, the NTECH team has developed a bioethics course to support computer scientists and health care professionals as they build and deploy ethical healthcare AI.
NTECH also prepares nurse scientists for employment in the health tech industry by cross-training them in computer and data science.
“We need more nurses at health technology design tables at companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and health technology startups so that nursing expertise is involved from the very envisioning of a product all the way through the end,” Fritz says.
Whether it’s AI use or a wearable device, nurses can evaluate if they are useful in real-life settings. If nurses have a seat at the table when health technologies are being designed, it could also help patients navigate the increasingly cluttered health technology landscape.