PICASSO
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Post intensive care accelerometry to study and support recovery outcomes
IRAS ID
365567
Contact name
Zoeb Jiwaji
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
The University of Edinburgh
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
NA, NA
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 2 days
Research summary
Many people who are sick enough to need treatment in an intensive care unit (ICU) and survive to leave hospital find it hard to return to normal life. They often have weak muscles, poor sleep, low mood, and experience troubling symptoms such as pain and breathlessness. Once they are home, these problems often go unnoticed by health care teams and patients often struggle to access the help they need to get better.
Small wearable devices, similar to smartwatches but with no screen, can record movement day and night and in future, may have the potential to communicate with healthcare teams and flag up patients that are having particular difficulties. They have been used in other patient groups (for example, monitoring recovery in patients recovering from Covid-19) but we do not yet know how useful they are for people leaving ICU.
In this study, we will invite 40 adults aged 18 or over who are going home from the ICU at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, Western General Hospital and St John’s Hospital, Livingstone. Each person will be asked to wear a smartwatch-style activity monitor all day and night for one month. We will stay in touch with patients and every two weeks ask a short set of questions about their health. The questions cover quality of life, sleep, pain or discomfort, mobility, self-care, usual activities, mental state and cognition.
We will analyse the watch data alongside the self-responses to standardised questionnaires to explore whether they might be able to provide healthcare teams with information about how recovering patients are feeling and functioning. We envisage that these devices may be clinically useful tools to facilitate identify problems early and offer the right support to people who are struggling after they go home, with the aim of improving recovery and quality of life.REC name
London - Queen Square Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
25/PR/1752
Date of REC Opinion
27 Jan 2026
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion