By Michael Fell, Research associate at UCL Energy Institute

ACCORDING to Alzheimer Scotland, 90,000 Scottish people are affected by dementia, with £2.63 billion being spent each year on care and treatment. Of that cost, about £880 million is for services provided by the NHS and local government. With the number of dementia patients expected to continue to grow and an NHS under increasing pressure, there is clearly an urgent need for innovation in the area of health and care services.

Scotland already has long experience with “telehealthcare” technologies, which use telecommunications to help avoid hospital visits, reduce length of hospital stays and help manage the burden on caregivers. So what other areas of technology could help to support healthcare in Scotland?

One of the surprising answers may be smart meters, which are being rolled out across Great Britain to help people manage their energy use. A research review conducted by colleagues and myself at University College London suggests they could play a role in supporting health and care services.

Many things we do at home involve using electricity or gas – making a cup of tea, cooking, doing the washing – and often there is some sort of daily pattern to this, such as getting out of bed and putting the kettle on. In future, by signing up to a service, smart meter data could be used to learn the electricity use patterns of (for example) a dementia patient. If they don’t use their kettle as usual in the morning, a text message could be automatically sent to relatives or carers prompting them to call and check everything is OK.

This new ability to detect changes in home energy use patterns unlocks the potential to recognise many health-relevant events. Insomnia could be shown by unusual appliance use at night; memory loss, by leaving appliances on for long periods; or poor living conditions by under-using heating. All these can be relevant to monitoring the progress of conditions such as dementia.

Compared to other telehealthcare technologies, smart meters have the added benefit that they are already being offered to all homes for other reasons (for example, energy billing). This near-ubiquity in the future suggests other possible uses. For example, if insomnia can be recognised, could this then be used to map sleep disturbance around airports? Work is also ongoing to test if it is possible to diagnose hard-to-heat homes from smart meter data, the health of whose occupants may benefit from getting extra insulation.

Nevertheless, there are some developments still needed before before smart meters can fully step into the healthcare space. Research is ongoing in accurately recognising some home appliances, and learning their usage patterns. There are also regulatory challenges if smart meters go from being ‘just’ a device for managing energy to one which is also responsible for monitoring health.

There is also the question of data privacy and security. Smart Energy GB research suggests that concern around smart meter data and privacy is low. This may be a reflection of the fact that, like health data, smart meter data is subject to tight regulation. But the importance of getting properly informed consent for uses of smart meter data is clear and providers will have to generate sufficient trust among users.

Finally, it is worth emphasising that while the research we have reviewed in this area suggests great promise, it is still quite early days. Collaborations such as that between Liverpool John Moores University and NHS Mersey Care will need to become more common if both the effectiveness of such an approach, and its acceptability to patients and health/care professionals, is to be persuasively demonstrated.

* The review mentioned in this article was funded by Smart Energy GB, the independent body tasked with communicating the smart meter rollout (in Great Britain) to consumers.