Reducing opioid related deaths for individuals who are at high risk of overdose: a co-production study

As drug deaths continue to rise across the UK, it is increasingly imperative that innovative interventions are sought, tested and implemented to address the complex issue of drug related deaths. This chapter focuses on co-production work with people who use opioids and who are risk of death from opioid overdose. It considers the practicality of wearing trackable devices and whether the data captured by these devices, designed to detect signs of a drug overdose, could be successfully transferred from the devices to a backend cloud service. The consensus amongst service users was that the benefits of wearable devices significantly outweighed the risks. It also found that it was feasible to use wearable devices for monitoring opioid users’ biomarkers remotely. The remote data acquisition and transfer process would not be a barrier for future research.