Health innovators bring future of MedTech to South Auckland

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth 

Health innovators joined the inaugural MedTech Explorer Showcase at the Fale in Māngere on 28 August, with a focus on bringing experts and technology directly to Māori and Pacific communities.

Medtech-iQ Aotearoa - Te Titoki Mataora is a MedTech research translator programme and Pacific module co-leads, Amio Matenga-Ikihele and Soteria Ieremia, said it was great to have more than 300 visitors to the showcase, including a number of large local school groups.

“We want to get kids involved and have them know there is more than one career pathway in health, outside of clinical,”  Matenga-Ikihele tells eHealthNews.

“You do not have to be a clinician, you can be a medtech developer or software engineer or designer.”

Clinicians were invited along to show them what is possible and available to use in their own practice.

Also, community members to see what they can do for themselves at home with medical technologies such as remote patient monitoring.

“It is about building awareness across the board from students to clinicians and communities because they are the end users of a lot of these technologies,” she  says.

The stands showcased innovations that have benefited from Medtech-iQ Aotearoa - Te Titoki Mataora funding.

Mairin Taylor, senior lecturer at Canterbury University, leads MindKiwi - a collaboration between university and Ngāi Tahu researchers to create a web-based mindfulness programme for children and whānau. 

She says the technology was originally developed for children with ADHD but has expanded due to “great results” and demand from clinicians and patients.

It is now in a randomised clinical trial with nearly 160 children across the motu, focusing on regulating emotions and behaviour.

“This trial never would have happened without Te Titoki Mataora funding,” Taylor says.

“The students today have been amazing asking really tricky questions, it has been great.”

Jonathan Naseri is manager of the kaiāwhina team at King St Medical, one of the seven pilot sites for the AI-powered diabetic retinopathy screening pilot in South Auckland. 

Two kaiāwhina have been trained to use the scanner in clinic, meaning patients now get a “one stop shop” with their eyes checked at the same time as their feet, as well as seeing the district nurse and getting diabetes education, he says.

Naseri tells eHealthNews that visitors to the showcase enjoyed getting to interact with the scanner and the young people were particularly interested in the AI aspect of the project.

Director of the NZ College of Chiropractic Research Centre Imran Niazi was at the showcase to demonstrate two technologies - a gait and balance app and a portable brain scanner.

He says patients would usually have to go to a specialist lab and be hooked up to “clunky machines” to have their brain activity scanned. 

Norteklabs have developed a small portable and more economic device that hooks over a patient’s ears, which connects to a mobile app to process the data.

Aluna Everitt is using Te Titoki Mataora funding to move towards commercialisation of her physio technology for use in the community. 

The tech uses a person’s phone camera and a soft band to track their movements, allowing people to recover at home and have access to their own data.

Another innovation on display is the result of a collaboration between Ceryx Medical and Auckland University and has developed a pacemaker that varies according to respiration, in order to improve heart failure treatment.

Auckland University senior research fellow Julia Shanks says the technology has been 15 years in the making, is about to go into clinical trial in sheep, and they have applied for ethics approval for a human trial.

Image: Medtech-iQ Aotearoa - Te Titoki Mataora Pacific co-leads, Amio Matenga-Ikihele and Soteria Ieremia with some school students at the MedTech Explorer Showcase 

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