What a day for team science and limb preservation! Today, November 10, we enrolled our first participants at USC in WIRED-UP, a pioneering clinical trial with a goal that matters deeply to our patients: more ulcer-free days after a wound has healed.
We are bringing together extraordinary teams from Johns Hopkins and Keck Medicine of USC, colleagues in prosthetics and orthotics at Hanger Clinic, and the technology team at Orpyx. Next-generation wearables, elite footwear and clinical expertise are coming together around the person wearing the shoes.
Keeping people in remission
A healed diabetic foot ulcer is a milestone worth celebrating. It is also the beginning of an ongoing effort to keep that wound closed. For people who have lost protective sensation, everyday pressure can build without the warning that pain would ordinarily provide.
That is why we talk about remission and ulcer-free days. The ambition is to help people spend more time moving through the world, enjoying their families and living their lives, with fewer interruptions from another wound.
Smart insoles with a purpose
WIREDUP, Wearable Insoles for Recurrent Diabetic Ulcer Prevention, is an NIH-funded, multisite randomized clinical trial evaluating whether sensory insoles and remote monitoring, added to standard care, can reduce recurrent plantar ulcers in people at high risk.
The Orpyx platform brings together insole measurements of pressure, temperature and activity, patient feedback, analytics and remote monitoring. The study compares this approach with standard therapeutic footwear and insoles. The academic research team retains independent responsibility for study oversight, data collection and analysis.
Our broader vision is to marry the very best of next-generation wearables with predictive AI-based analytics and elite footwear, so that information from daily life can help us recognize risk earlier and respond more effectively. WIRED-UP will help establish what this approach can actually deliver for patients. Whether it reduces recurrence is the question the trial is designed to answer.
Elite teams making it happen
This is where collaboration becomes real. Caitlin Hicks’ (Study PI) Johns Hopkins team brings the study leadership and research team. Keck Medicine of USC (Armstrong, Site PI) brings our limb-preservation clinicians and research colleagues. Hanger brings prosthetics and orthotics expertise, including the practical work of footwear and insole fitting. Orpyx brings the sensory-insole technology, analytics platform and remote-monitoring program.
It takes all of that expertise, working together, to turn an ambitious research question into a study visit that works for a real person. A huge thank-you to the clinical and research teams, our collaborators, and especially the participants who are helping us build the evidence for better prevention.
Building on years of work
This milestone builds on a long line of work shared here on DF Blog. Our Smarter Sole Survival research explored how people in diabetic foot remission respond to smart-insole alerts. We later brought that work into a broader discussion of smart technologies to extend ulcer-free days.
Today, we take another important step forward at USC. We are excited to do the careful work, learn alongside our patients and keep pushing toward more ulcer-free, activity-rich days in remission.
Let’s keep people moving. Let’s keep people in remission. Let’s act against amputation.
#WIREDUP #ActAgainstAmputation #DiabeticFoot #LimbPreservation #SmartInsoles #DigitalHealth
Limb-preservation community: ALPS · Johns Hopkins Vascular Surgery · Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health · Keck Medicine of USC · USC Research · USC · APMA · Society for Vascular Surgery · Hanger Clinic · Orpyx.
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