Interview with Lucie Glenday

Lucie Glenday is the founder and Chief Product Officer at MySense, a wellbeing analytics platform designed for patients to use at home. MySense helps people of all abilities live independently at home and brings reassurance to their families.

Hi Lucie, please tell us about your STEM journey.

“I’ve always been mathematically minded, genetically blessed from my father I think. At school I found maths boring until we started learning about statistics, applied maths and mechanics and then I became really interested. I did maths and physics, alongside two others at A Level and was fully committed to becoming an aeronautical engineer. I interned at British Aerospace and whilst it was everything I had wanted it to be, I began to be perturbed by the fact that I was only one of two women working in engineering on site. I’m sure it’s changed now, but at the time it was not going to be an easy path. I switched at the last minute to read law. 

“In 2016, I founded MySense. I’ve been incredibly lucky along the way; I’ve worked with brilliant people who have fed my thirst for learning in this space.”

Why did you build MySense?

“Because I had to. I lost my sister at the age of 23 to a rare form of Motor Neurone Disease and during her decline I always felt that we were on the back foot, never knowing what we needed to do next to let her retain some level of control and dignity. And whilst I was at Surrey County Council, I met with front line staff and residents that were in similar situations. When you’re at your most vulnerable you need as much information at your fingertips to make the right choices.”

How does it support vulnerable people?

“My Sense is a best-in-class product that predicts health decline and deterioration. 

“The predictive process starts in the home, before any illness or frailty manifests itself, and helps understand the unique characteristics of ageing in each person.  Our innovative system utilises advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to track and interpret the data collected, enabling early detection of potential health risks and personalised recommendations for disease management. 

“Our aim is to prevent a problem, a fall or an admission to hospital before it happens, which is better for the user, their families and the health service.”

Tell us about your collection of ethical data.

“Our ethical approach is embodied in all that we do and we’re committed to an ethical data policy – we’re a BCorp and a member of the Data For Good Foundation. We don’t listen or watch the individuals we support, just learn about their activities of daily living and health metrics through passive sensor technologies. All the data we collect belongs to them, we have no ability to share it or sell it. They need to trust us to be good and in return we will fiercely protect their privacy and dignity.”

How do the sensors work with the data?

“We’ve had to build firmware for and manage deployments of various iterations of sensors over the past six years and during this time, sensor technology has moved on significantly. We are now working with - and soon to be deploying, some really exciting IoT and WiFi sensing partners to allow us to worry less about data collection and therefore focus on the predictive capabilities of the platform. We currently pick up around 20,000 data points per day per individual we support, these come from a health watch, a bed sensor and six passive sensors located in specific places across the home.

“Our platform has multiple layers of algorithms and AI all orchestrated in a complex dance to ensure we can get the greatest level of understanding around the individuals’ activities and health. We then apply environmental and contextual attributes and then overlay disease models. This is critical in a home setting where lots of external factors come into play. It’s a data science and data engineering masterpiece, but it needs to be constantly fed and refined to get us closer and closer to certainty with our personalised insights.”

How do you see the future of healthcare?

“We need to fundamentally reassess how we look after people managing conditions. Healthcare needs to be personalised, and patients need greater control over the care pathways they follow and when to engage clinicians. It comes back to that word ‘dignity’, and the ability to make choices plays a big part in that. 

“The most efficient way to manage demand is to run patients through a process, limiting personalisation and choice. MySense helps two-fold. Firstly, it aims to reduce the demand by getting ahead of problems, reducing the need for emergency interventions. Secondly, it offers contextualised health insights and reports to allow a patient to choose when to engage, and clinicians the opportunity to offer a personalised patient experience that responds to the individual’s needs rather than the system’s.”

What is a healthcare challenge you'd like to solve?

“The above. But we won’t do it on our own. We’re naturally collaborative as an organisation and we have worked with some great academic, technology and clinical partners. We actively seek academic validation of impact for every deployment we undertake. We’re obviously quite protective of our IP, all our data science is built in-house, but we’re always looking to find partners to work with for research purposes.”