Quarantine Tech: Remote Monitoring Tools Could Predict COVID-19 Problems Before They Escalate
Next-gen at-home monitoring tech can help direct coronavirus care where it’s needed most, in a scalable way.
Social distance. Isolation. Lock down. Quarantine. In seemingly every city, country and township around the world, people are closing up shop, bringing kids home from school and keeping to themselves, all in the hope of minimizing the spread of COVID-19. But what happens after we close the doors? How do we monitor our health efficiently and effectively when we’re alone?
Oxitone Wearable Vitals Monitor
“In Israel, I’ve seen people get into quarantine,” says Leon Eisen, an Israeli inventor and founder of Oxitone. “They close the door and nobody knows what happened to them! Then if something happens, they call an ambulance, which comes with all of this equipment to take the person to the hospital.”
It’s an inefficient, scattershot approach, says Eisen, and it isn’t the least bit scaleable. Eisen has watched the spread of COVID-19 with keen interest because he’s one of a handful of health entrepreneurs who have created devices that could feasibly monitor the health of large quarantined populations, predicting illness early and sending medical care where it’s needed most.
Over the last few years, Leon Eisen and his team at Oxitone created a wrist-worn vitals monitor that makes tracking at-home health metrics as easy as wearing an Apple Watch. Easier, in one critical way — the battery lasts 24 hours. Unique to Oxitone is the patented ability to take a continuous blood oxygen reading from the patient’s wrist, something that usually requires an alligator clip pinching the patient’s fingertip. Eisen initially sought to build this remote monitoring device to help his own father, and elderly patients like him, and under that use case he’s earned five patents and partnered with institutions like Northwell Health, Texas Medical System and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. But the news of the coronavirus opened up a much broader application of his invention.
“In Israel, I’ve seen people get into quarantine,” says Leon Eisen, an Israeli inventor and founder of Oxitone. “They close the door and nobody knows what happened to them! Then if something happens, they call an ambulance, which comes with all of this equipment to take the person to the hospital.”
Imagine a thousand people under quarantine, says Eisin, painting a hypothetical. Each is wearing an Oxitone vitals monitor on their wrist. It continuously tracks respiratory rate, skin temperature, pulse rate, heart rate and blood oxygen (among other vitals). That continuous, hospital-grade data is captured and plotted in the cloud in order to instantly identify outliers and trends. In this hypothetical scenario, one nurse could monitor the health metrics of a thousand patients under observation, thanks to the system’s predictive AI spotting problems before anyone dials 911 or even uses telemedicine.
“You don’t have to open and watch patient data until there is some kind of alert,” says Eisen. This, in fact, is the device’s greatest value proposition, he adds. Unlike conventional telemedicine, which still requires one-by-one interactions, the Oxitone 1000M would predict problems before they’re noticeable and automatically focus medical care where it is needed most.
Health Transformer
Leon Eisen, CEO and founder of Oxitone
Device
Oxitone 1000M
Deployment
FDA- and CE-cleared, ready for mass production
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MouthLab by Aidar Health
Like Leon Eisen, when Sathya Elumalai built the MouthLab device, he was thinking about his mother, not a pandemic. She lives in India and suffers from multiple chronic conditions including hypertension and diabetes. Elumalai, working thousands of miles away in Baltimore with his Johns Hopkins colleague Gene Fridman, wanted a way to monitor her health without disrupting her life. Together, the two lab partners founded Aidar Health and built an at-home health assessment tool that is as simple to use as an electric toothbrush.
The smooth white device, whose design pulled a page out of the iPhone playbook, works a bit like a breathalyzer (hence the name), but acts like a Star Trek tricorder. When a patient breathes into the device’s mouthpiece for 30 seconds it captures a range of vitals including blood pressure, EKG, respiration rate, SpO2, respiratory flow-cycle morphology, and spirometry lung functions. This first-of-its-kind device has been winning innovation awards around the globe, including the Mayo Clinic’s people’s choice award during MassChallenge.
“If someone is quarantined, they need objective data.” -Sathya Elumalai, CEO of Aidar Health
As news of the coronavirus took over the airwaves in the United States, Elumalai began to lose sleep. He’d stay awake thinking about how, with its ability to measure lung function and track breathing patterns, his invention was uniquely suited to COVID-19, which causes respiratory distress. In the right hands, it would be a powerful health assessment tool during a quarantine, or in an over-extended hospital. Like Eisen with Oxitone, Elumalai imagines a scenario where entire quarantined populations can be monitored from home, picking up signs of lung distress and potential illness before the patient pops a high temperature.
“Today we have an opportunity to save lives. If someone is quarantined, they need objective data,” says Elumalai. “Almost all of the parameters measured using MouthLab have great significance in not only predicting and managing COVID-19 infected patients but also individuals who are susceptible to infections due to their compromised immune system or preexisting conditions.”
MouthLab is still in the process of getting FDA approval — applying under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) program — but is already in talks with multiple health systems and the Department of Defense about a rapid roll-out in the coming weeks and months.
Health Transformer
Sathya Elumalai, CEO and co-founder of Aidar Health
Device
MouthLab
Deployment
Expecting rapid FDA approval in April 2020, ready for mass production
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startuphealth.com/aidar-health
Keeping It Simple with Remote Temperature
Oxitone and Aidar created Swiss Army devices that could measure nearly a dozen vitals at a time. While that can be incredibly informative, especially when taken together and run through a smart AI engine, sometimes simplicity is the order of the day. California-based Tahmo is creating a clip-on wireless body temperature monitor that tracks that one key vital and transmits it via bluetooth to a smartphone or health provider. In a quarantine setting, individuals could clip the small device to their undershirt as though they were pinning on a nametag, and the rest would be handled in the cloud.
“With the latest COVID-19 outbreak, this device will minimize interaction with patients thus reducing the risk associated with coming into contact with infected patients,” says Tahmo’s founder and CEO Arif Quronfleh. “The sensor is designed for wearability, with a low-profile that is comfortable for various body types. The proprietary design also compensates for the body’s suppression of signal transmission and provides notifications to alert caregivers about the current condition of their patients.”
Health Transformer
Arif Quronfleh, CEO and founder of Tahmo
Device
Thermi
Deployment
In Development
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These three at-home monitors represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to quarantine tech. There is an entire remote monitoring industry that has previously focused on older patients, but can now be leveraged at the population health level to battle COVID-19. At this point in the pandemic, it’s less about which monitor we use, and more about jumpstarting health engagement at scale. Whether it’s with a simple temperature monitor or an all-in-one vitals solution, it’s time to fully leverage the wireless monitoring tools in the market to leapfrog over time-consuming episodic care and begin predicting health problems before they escalate.
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