The year 2022 is known as the first year of accelerated aging in China.
According to statistics, in 2022, the population aged 60 and above reached 28,040,000 people, accounting for 19.8% of the country’s population, and this figure is still growing year by year. Based on the huge market space, the market size of China’s senior care industry also grew from 6.6 trillion yuan in 2018 to 8.8 trillion yuan in 2021, with a CAGR of 10.1%. With the deepening of aging in China, the senior care market will further expand in the future.
The growth of the elderly population, however, brings not only market opportunities, but also challenges of geriatric healthcare. According to Prof. Bin Hu from the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Calgary, Canada, “Aging is not just about caring for the lives of the elderly, but the core of it is the management of chronic diseases in old age.”
Currently, about 80% of the elderly in China suffer from one or more chronic diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Most of the diseases in this category need to be managed by patients on their own, so good or bad adherence becomes an important factor in disease progression. In addition, drug management is only the relief of the root symptoms of the disease, and patients need to further rehabilitate through exercise for the loss of life functions caused by the disease.
Based on this, Prof. Hu Bin developed a Buge music training system, which completed trials at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in 2012 and entered the Canadian market, and officially landed in China in 2015.
Initially, Prof. Hu developed Buge with the intention of providing exercise intervention for Parkinson’s patients. Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative disease caused by the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra and the deposition of synaptic nucleoprotein. Through animal model simulations, Prof. Hu found that there are cue cells in the brain, which have strong network plasticity, and can adjust the human body’s motor and emotional responses to the environment through the special sensitivity of the brain’s downstream arousal and motivation system to auditory, visual, and somatosensory sensations, which makes spontaneous healing of Parkinson’s possible. Based on this discovery, Prof. Hu launched the research and development of Buge.
Buge is a Canadian national research and development project, certified by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, that reorganizes neural networks and autonomously controls gait and stride length through the special activation of brain reward and cueing cellular systems between music and walking.Buge collects patients’ movement data through wearable smart sensing devices and transmits it to a cloud server for evaluation and testing, and then customizes exercise prescriptions according to patients’ physical conditions. Exercise prescriptions are customized according to the patient’s physical condition, while case records are kept for doctor’s follow-up. In addition, Buge will allow patients to consult at home anytime and anywhere through the app, and doctors will be able to supervise patients’ exercise through the app, which is remote in nature. In addition, on the medical side, the first-hand data collected by Buge can also provide support for subsequent research on Parkinson’s disease treatment, further promoting the progress of medical standards.
Since the birth of Buge in Canada in 2012, Prof. Hu has conducted hundreds of clinical trials, and the results show that Buge can indeed improve patients’ physical functions and Parkinson’s disease by stimulating the brain nerves. It is worth mentioning that the stimulation brought by Buge to patients is not a single layer, the following three different therapeutic interventions are skillfully and effectively combined, thus greatly improving the trainer’s compliance and training effect.
The first layer is to regulate the patient’s stride length. Parkinson’s patients will gradually slow down due to neurological problems and their gait will be reduced, if left unchecked, the phenomenon of freezing gait will become more serious, and the patient’s balance will deteriorate until the patient is unable to take care of himself or herself.Buge will enable patients to consciously train their motor intentionality and physical vitality through the use of a musical feedback system, which will allow them to get sufficient training to improve their freezing gait. The second layer is musical stimulation. Research has found that music causes dopamine release as well as induces changes in the brain in terms of motor, memory and cognitive behavioral performance, which improves the patient’s control of movement and balance. The third layer of stimulation is aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise training is effective in reversing the loss of hippocampal volume that accompanies memory loss in late adulthood. Through brain imaging as well as patient feedback, the majority of patients experience a dramatic improvement in freezing gait and achieve further recovery of physical function after 3 months of using Buge.
Prof. Hu was inspired by Buge’s breakthrough in Parkinson’s disease. Taking this as an opportunity, Prof. Hu expanded the application of Buge to a series of more than ten common chronic diseases in the elderly caused by the brain nerves, such as Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, and peripheral arterial disease.
According to Prof. Hu, “The core of Buge’s success in improving more than ten chronic diseases in the elderly lies in the innovation of exercise prescription.” Buge follows the basic principles of FITT-VP (Frequency, Intensity, Modality, Time, Total, and Exercise Progression) and utilizes a big data platform to physicalize the concept of exercise prescription. A set of exercise prescription is customized for the patient through the data of the patient’s basic physical condition, as well as the expected effect of the disease treatment.The exercise prescription prescribed by Buge includes exercise programs for multiple body parts such as thighs, knees, ankles, arms, wrists, etc., and parameters such as the exercise time, exercise frequency, and stride length are also stipulated in detail. This ensures the effectiveness of the patient’s exercise and at the same time prevents unnecessary physical injuries caused by excessive exercise. At present, according to different diseases, Buge’s medical rehabilitation team has designed a variety of exercise prescription models in order to cope with patients with different needs.
In addition to software enhancement, there are also Buge’s innovations at the hardware level. Prof. Hu said, “The sports bracelets on the market are only the first generation of smart wearable devices, while Buge is the newly upgraded second generation.” Common sports bracelets on the market often only record the user’s exercise data, and do not intervene in the user’s exercise habits, which is why Prof. Hu called it “first generation”. Buge’s wearable device can not only record the user’s exercise habits, but also guide and intervene in the patient’s exercise. And from the point of view of the performance of hardware facilities, Buge sensor every 20ms will be a step length, step count, time and other data collection, its accuracy is 10 times higher than the general wearable devices.
With the support of Buge, many chronic patients’ daily rehabilitation training as well as consultation with doctors and doctor-patient communication can be carried out at home. For the elderly, this approach eliminates the need to travel between hospitals and homes, eliminates the possibility of delays due to limited medical resources, and reduces the burden of accompanying children to the hospital. From the hospital’s perspective, Buge saves medical resources and follows the development trend of geriatric care.
At present, Buge has reached cooperation with the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Beijing 301 Hospital, China Rehabilitation Hospital, Sichuan Bayi Rehabilitation Hospital, Zhejiang Rehabilitation Medical Center, Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine and other medical institutions and research institutions, and the product is being promoted in the market.
In response to the wave of AI, Buge will access AI plug-ins to further develop the “big language model”, simplify the operation steps and processes, and help elderly users cross the digital divide. At the same time, Buge will also spread its product pipeline horizontally to further expand its application areas and realize remote health management for more diseases.
Although Buge has only been in China for a few years, all Buge products in China have been localized from sensing devices to software upgrades and even patient data processing, laying a good foundation for future market promotion. Prof. Hu said, “In the face of a growing elderly population, the domestic medical industry has enormous room for development and growth. Taking the success of the Canadian market as a reference, I believe Buge can also provide more Chinese elderly patients with more convenient and efficient chronic disease management services.”