APT Center's Drs. Margot Damaser and Steve Majerus partner with Bright Uro to license a device that aids Veterans with bladder disorders
Drs. Margot Damaser and Steve Majerus, Investigators at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center's Advanced Platform Technology (APT) Center and inventors of UroMonitor, spearheaded a licensing agreement with medical device company Bright Uro for the UroMonitor sensor.
UroMonitor promises to improve the quality of diagnostic data to guide health decisions and broaden access to advanced urinary tools, even in rural or remote clinics. Unlike existing diagnostic tools, UroMonitor can provide insights into how the bladder behaves in the Veteran's home environment, or in response to specific treatments.
Urinary incontinence contributes to social isolation and clinical depression and associates with military service and post-traumatic stress disorder in both male and female Veterans. Injuries to the spine also frequently cause incontinence, and according to one VA study, more than 80% of Veterans being treated for Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) experienced one or more bladder disorder symptoms. Restoring urine storage ability is consistently cited as a treatment priority for Veterans living with SCI or urinary incontinence. Effective treatments rely on accurate diagnostic tools like UroMonitor.
The UroMonitor sensor (pictured above) provides real-time measurement of bladder pressure without catheters and is inserted into the bladder without surgery. UroMonitor recently finished its first human trial in 11 adult women with refractory overactive bladder disorder. Drs. Damaser and Majerus, also on staff at the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, worked in collaboration with both organizations to develop the technology for this device. Their future efforts are investigating how sensors like UroMonitor can be used with neuromodulation therapies to restore continence. This new treatment for Veterans with SCI is being investigated following an $890,000 Merit Review Award from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) last November. While on the clinical side UroMonitor will improve outcomes for neuromodulation evaluations in Veterans with bladder disorders, Damaser and Majerus believe the greatest benefit will be improving the lives of Veterans who could be able to eliminate the discomfort and inconvenience of using indwelling catheters from their care regimens.
About The APT Center
The Advanced Platform Technology (APT) Center is a Department of Veterans Affairs Research Center in the Rehabilitation Research and Development Service. The Center addresses the pressing clinical needs of disabled Veterans by harnessing the most recent developments in untapped engineering and basic science disciplines and applying them to design and disseminate new rehabilitation interventions.
Learn more about the APT Center here, and subscribe to the APT Center YouTube channel to stay updated on all their research.