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24 April 2026
Prof Louise Rose says she is excited about the future of Life Lines as the service continues to evolve as a personalised digital ICU patient recovery pathway.
And the recent development of a sensored ball that measures movement biomarkers has the team eyeing UK-wide exposure.
Life Lines was established at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to allow families to connect with loved ones in intensive care units (ICU) when hospitals closed for visitors. Using a secure platform on tablet devices, families could video call loved ones in ICU and get progress updates from clinicians.
King’s Health Partners (KHP) was involved in the rollout, as the service supported more than 130,000 virtual visits and provided more than 1,400 Android devices to hospitals during the pandemic.
Prof Rose, Head of Division of Digital Health and Applied Technology Assessment at King’s College London, set up Life Lines with colleague Dr Joel Meyer, and Michel Paquet, the CEO at that time of Aetonix, a company specialising in a virtual care platform. Both Prof Rose and Dr Meyer, an intensive care consultant at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (FT), were awarded MBEs in 2023 for services to the NHS during COVID-19.
Speaking to KHP News, Prof Rose gave an update on Life Lines and its future plans.
Following on from the pandemic, how has Life Lines evolved?
Our recovery pathway has been running for five years, established as a service innovation within Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS FT as part of the Life Lines programme. It remains supported by the Life Lines gift from Google, who wanted us to continue to use it for digital innovation to support ICU patients and family members.
When patients are discharged from hospital they connect with their recovery coordinator via a digital interface, for example a mobile phone or laptop. They are enrolled onto the 12-week pathway, and the recovery coordinator helps manage their challenges and barriers through setting goals and providing relevant resources.
Using the digital recovery goal menu, the coordinator works with the patient to choose the goals that are important to them, either from the dropdown list or they can write their own. Over a 12-week period we work with the patient to achieve their goals and set new ones.
For example, a patient may say a goal is to be able to stand at their bathroom sink and brush their teeth independently. Then in two weeks’ time they may say they’d like to be able to walk to the shops and buy groceries. It’s progressive and tailored to that person’s goals, and how we can support them to achieve those goals.
We’ve also been working with Dr Matthew Howard and Sacha Morris from King’s Engineering to develop what we’re calling a squeeze ball. It’s fitted with a series of sensors that measure grip strength, overhead reach, standing balance, and gait. These are all important movement biomarkers in terms of establishing frailty and risks such as of falls, but also to enable us to track recovery.
We’ve been testing and validating this ball to ensure that it can measure what we want it to measure. The beauty of this ball is that it’s highly portable so people can easily take it home, and it doesn’t involve the completion of the long patient reported outcome measure forms for us to establish their physical functioning.
It doesn’t require a clinician to go to the home or a patient to come into a hospital. And our vision is that it will provide a continuous and real life, real world, measurement of movement parameters, which is different to how we normally monitor these.
We’ve been through the King’s College London MedTech Accelerator programme to consider things like commercialisation, so we’re excited to see how it progresses.
What has been the impact of Life Lines on patient care?
The whole rationale behind building our digital pathway is that there is a lack of support for patients who have been critically ill, have been admitted to hospital, and are then discharged home in the early discharge period.
The post-ICU recovery clinic service at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS FT sees patients at approximately three months after hospital discharge. We were cognisant that there’s this big 12 to 16 week gap where basically patients are left to their own devices.
The benefit of this pathway is to pick up these patients when they get home and support them through those initial 12 weeks. By doing that we see that when they do come into the recovery clinic, they are in a far better position than those patients who have experienced all these challenges and not had any help.
Our patients are on a trajectory of getting better, they’ve had referrals enacted, and they’re achieving their recovery goals on their way back to normal life.
This digital pathway model within KHP is unique in the UK, and pretty much around the world from the conversations I’ve been having with international colleagues. Picking up patients in this period to fill this need gap that we’ve known about for years but people haven’t been able to do much about it.
How would you like to see Life Lines progressing as a service?
We want to see our pathway adopted by other centres both in the UK and internationally. There are funded randomised control trials in Australia that are replicating our pathway, which will be interesting to see.
Once we transfer to our new digital platform, which is a known NHS provider and has been used by other centres, we think we’ll be in a better position to expand and get our pathway used by more patients.
With the squeeze ball - as it’s a device that measures movement biomarkers - there are so many ways it can be used. For example, from a wellness perspective people would be able to monitor their own movement ability.
