WellBound: Study supports home dialysis

WellBound (Mountain View, California), a company that combines educational programs with home dialysis therapies, reported results of a study supporting increased adoption of self-care dialysis therapies. The findings, presented at the Annual Dialysis Conference in San Francisco, showed that when provided with early dialysis options education, a large number of patients chose a home-based therapy over traditional in-center hemodialysis.

WellBound said it analyzed the dialysis therapy selections of 576 patients after they received early education on all available treatment options, including conventional in-center hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, renal transplant, and the various home hemodialysis regimens.

Results showed that 42% of these patients selected a self-care therapy. Of 206 patients who have completed training, 164 (80%) chose peritoneal dialysis, and 42 (20%) home hemodialysis. Nationally, only 7% of all new dialysis patients select home dialysis as their therapy choice.

VivoMetrics to conduct space sleep study

VivoMetrics (Ventura, California), in partnership with the University of Limerick (Ireland) and with sponsorship from the European Space Agency , said it would be conducting a study to evaluate and determine the quality of sleep of astronauts while in orbit, with the goal of providing a healthier sleep environment for astronauts in the future.

As part of the study, Thomas Reiter, a German astronaut, will wear the VivoMetrics LifeShirt System aboard the International Space Station, after traveling there on the Discovery Space Shuttle later this year.

In the experiment, astronauts will wear the lightweight, machine-washable garment with embedded sensors to record sleep activity by assessing cardiac activity from an electrocardiogram and other physiological parameters. They will use an integrated PDA to answer a series of sleep-related questions as part of a subjective “sleep diary.“ Analysis software will then produce a sleep spectrogram that researchers will use to measure the astronauts' stability of sleep.

VivoMetrics describes the LifeShirt as the first non-invasive, ambulatory monitoring system that continuously collects, records, and analyzes a broad range of cardiopulmonary parameters.