SME of the Week: EXi – Revolutionising the delivery of care in the pandemic

Accelerator SME EXi’s Co-Founder and Clinical Director, Carron Manning, explains how EXi has not only adapted to the challenges of the pandemic but has also created tailored exercise prescriptions specifically for those with COVID-19.

Revolutionising the delivery of care has never been as important as it is now. EXi’s data portal has been built for health professionals to bridge the gap in patient follow-up and supporting long-term sustainable behaviour change. With 2020 putting more pressure on healthcare services, digital innovation is critical. EXi has been rolled out to support multiple clinical rehab programmes over the past few months, allowing them to continue to deliver their service whilst remotely monitoring their patients.

EXi’s purpose is to change people’s lives by providing a supportive platform for sustainable behaviour change. We do this through empowering people to understand the value of working at their correct intensity level and identifying their optimum heart rate zones safely. We are also supporting clinicians and other health professionals to efficiently prescribe a safe intensity-based exercise prescription made available to all who need it in a time when access to leisure centres and spaces for face-to-face exercise programmes is limited.

EXi provides clinical results that can scale: On average, use of EXi leads to a 10% reduction in resting heart rate, 18% reduction in blood glucose, 20% improvement in fatigue and 27% improvement in pain. More of our results can be found at www.exi.life along with information on our sustainable programme, which focuses on using health devices, such as an Apple Watch, to sustain change and log accurate health data for efficient and effective change.

COVID-19 has been in full flow for nearly a year and we now know there are longer-term effects, resulting in Long-Covid where a proportion of people are experiencing a prolonged recovery. Prevention is something the EXi app can focus on; there’s no preventing someone from catching COVID-19, but there is the ability to reduce risk of how the virus may affect a patient. We have adapted our platform to tailor to this current need. A patient will download the EXi app and can choose COVID-19 as a medical condition, allowing the app to tailor their exercise prescription. There has been a decline in physical activity in the UK due to COVID-19, when in fact it is of vital importance that those who suffer from chronic conditions, such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension continue to move their body, but safely at the right intensity.

This is where EXi truly shines, encouraging tailored exercise prescriptions at low, moderate and high intensity. We endeavour to educate everyone, especially those who have any of the listed 23 chronic conditions, on the importance of intensity and heart rate. Currently partaking in several studies around exercise in the form of prescription, we believe we are at the forefront of healthcare innovation. Recent highlights include a Tier 4 weight management programme at Barts, a stroke patient study in Ireland and we have recently won a contract with the NHS to deliver a national programme, in partnership with ICS Health.

As a DigitalHealth.London SME, we are in the midst of conducting life-changing studies and bringing more than digital innovation to the field – we are proving the benefits of exercise as an achievable form of care in prevention and recovery.

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