Pioneering gloves seek to tackle skin disorders

Researchers at the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, King's College London hope to design and test pioneering, .

Building on a recently completed, award-winning project, which developed seamless dressing retention garments for people suffering from the rare skin condition, Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB), this new research will focus specifically on how to protect and prolong patients' use of their hands.

Hands are an especially difficult area for people with such skin conditions. They often need frequent surgery, or have to wear cumbersome splints, to prevent their fingers fusing together and their hands contracting.

Hand deformities can worsen with age, and surgical correction becomes increasingly difficult. The project will look at developing a wound dressing glove and a 'splint glove', incorporating computer-knitted textiles with an engineered system of adjustable splints and electronic sensors, which will relay information and allow practitioners to remotely monitor the condition of their patients' hands.

To this aim, Dr Patricia Grocott, Reader in Palliative Wound Care, King's College London, and the principal investigator on the project, will lead a unique collaboration between patients,clinicians, academic researchers, clothing design consultants, garment manufacturers, economists, bio-engineers, electrical engineers, textile manufacturers, a digital data capture and a 3D scanning company.

Together, the team of experts will work with patients over a three year period to co-design and test these two novel high tech gloves, which will aim to delay hand deformities and reduce both surgical interventions and hospital stays.

To enable them to design these high-tech gloves, the researchers have recently been awarded just over £1.6 million from the National Institute for Health Research Invention for Innovation (NIHR i4i) Programme.

Dr Grocott, who works closely with the specialist EB team at St Thomas' and Great Ormond Street Hospitals, says, ''this funding will enable us to investigate practical evidence-based solutions for people with painful and disabling conditions affecting their hands. These conditions require lengthy procedures,such as dressing changes. On the hands this means wrapping individual fingers with dressings and bandages, which inevitably takes a long time, intrudes on someone's day, and is costly...Not only can these new products relieve patients and clinicians of much of the painful, time consuming and repetitive tasks associated with hand therapy, they can also save patients' time and NHS money. Also exciting are the prospective applications for the new technologies we'redeveloping and testing. While this project focuses on patients with EB, I've already had interest from people looking to treat other skin conditions, for example burns. There is a lot of potential here to help many people.''

The design process for the new products will incorporate digital and electronic data capture systems to enable clinicians to obtain exact measurements of an individual's hands, which will also be used by the manufacturers, meaning the products will be tailored to fit and function optimally for each patient.

In addition the researchers will work on a workable economic model that will provide a means of determining the value of the new devices,over current options. The team anticipates that there will be a considerable cost saving to be made through using the new products.