5 Contactless Health Monitoring Platforms That Collect Data Noninvasively
Contactless technology is a form of remote health monitoring that uses AI to analyze vital signs, facial expressions, facial blood flow, or vocal behavior to detect medical issues faster than a more invasive physical exam.
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Circadia Health
Israel-based startup Neteera Technologies secured $13 million in Series B funding for its contactless patient monitoring back in April 2023 from healthcare investment firm Aescuvest along with other investors such as Omega Healthcare. It then announced in October 2023 that it raised an additional $6.7 million in a Series B extension.
These funding rounds will allow Neteera to ramp up development of its FDA-cleared medical sensing platform. The contactless solution enables continuous monitoring of patients’ biomarkers without physical contact or involvement from a patient. A less intrusive data-collection method allows doctors to spend less time on collecting data. The sensing platform’s high-frequency Neteera 130H sub-THz radar lets the Neteera platform monitor vital signs such as heart rate, respiratory rate, respiratory depth, and inhale-exhale ratio through clothing and bedding and without a provider present. The technology can measure “micro-skin displacements” from heartbeats and respiration as the patient breathes.
In addition, Neteera enables providers to detect sleep disorders, according to Isaac Litman, founder and CEO of Neteera.
Neteera also tracks bed occupancy, vacancy indication, and vacancy frequency analysis. Caregivers can install the radar over a bed in a skilled nursing facility, hospital, or a home. Providers can then use the data as part of their telemedicine sessions and monitor patient data from their offices or nurse stations.
Doctors receive alerts based on thresholds they set for when vital signs fall out of an acceptable range. Neteera stores data and algorithms in the cloud, and providers access the data through an API. A dashboard shows vital sign thresholds, bed occupancy, and patient data analytics.
“The data is transmitted to the cloud, analyzed, and stored in the cloud,” Litman tells InformationWeek via email. “The user (provider) can access the data via Neteera’s HealthGate, a dedicated online platform that provides data, analysis, and alerts.”
A key benefit of contactless health monitoring for health IT leaders and clinicians is to receive continuous data updates rather than “spot” information, according to Litman.
“A continuous stream of data allows for a better understanding of the patient status and changes,” he says.
At CES 2024, NuraLogix introduced the Anura MagicMirror, a tabletop smart mirror that studies facial blood flow to assess vital signs and disease risks. It uses the company’s DeepAffex cloud-based platform to collect health data using affective AI and make it accessible as part of a user’s everyday routine. Affective AI is a combination of AI and affective computing. Corporate offices, schools, retirement homes, pharmacies, and doctors’ offices have integrated the 21.5-inch smart mirror into their environments.
Without any contact, a user can sit in front of the mirror and participate in a 30-second scan. Transdermal optical imaging (TOI) technology, a type of remote photoplethysmography (rPPG), detects a person’s face automatically and spots areas to focus on and extract blood flow information.
Data from the MagicMirror helps collect readings on blood pressure, breathing rate, BMI, and heart rate. It also contributes to metabolic health assessments for risk of conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, and fatty liver disease.
After the smart mirror’s video camera extracts facial blood flow information, the platform performs AI model analysis in the cloud to generate health data from patterns in facial blood flow, the company reported. The company developed the platform based on data from more than 40,000 patients.
After the smart mirror collects user data, the platform does not store a user’s image on the company’s side, according to NuraLogix’s Thompson.
“Upon completion of the scan (in which we only see pixelated images of facial blood flow -- no identifying features), all content regarding the user’s image is deleted, and no content is sent/stored anywhere else,” says Thompson. “The scan information is stored on the user’s personal device, to allow them to track trends over time.”
The platform’s web-based DeepAffex dashboard lets doctors’ offices, hospitals, and pharmacies collect raw data and measure results. The dashboard is designed for developers and system administrators, according to Thompson.
Contactless health monitoring tools add an additional layer of data but do not replace health professionals, Thompson notes.
“Health IT leaders should keep in mind that contactless health monitoring will provide many benefits to their practice, including easiness of integration, compatibility to expand platforms to accommodate a variety of use cases, data aggregation ability for the administrators, strong data privacy protection, and more,” Thompson says. “Although contactless health monitoring is not intended to be a replacement for a medical professional, it will provide many benefits and act as an extra tool to assist in their practice.”
The Blueskeye B-Healthy AI platform uses facial recognition to create behavioral digital biomarkers, which measure emotion, gaze, and facial muscle actions. By studying body pose and tone of voice, the AI app can help healthcare providers monitor medical conditions such as depression, motor-neuron diseases, or fatigue. As users play a psychometric game or record a video journal, the app collects data on facial muscle actions, gaze direction, and tone of voice as well as other behaviors, explains Michel Valstar, founder, chief evangelist, and scientific officer at Blueskeye AI.
In addition, the Blueskeye platform uses ML to train data models and study evaluation data. Blueskeye processes the data at the edge and stores it in the company’s cloud platform.
“For the kinds of conditions we are providing solutions for, physical contact has never been a key requirement,” Valstar tells InformationWeek via email. “Most of the time the diagnostic measures come from self-report questionnaires or a structural interview with a fixed set of questions delivered by a health professional. Blueskeye AI's solutions addresses many of the shortcomings of questionnaires and in-person interviews.”
Valstar notes that the data the AI app collects is anonymous, and users can share it with providers at their discretion.
“B-Healthy is designed so that all face and voice analysis occurs on people's own devices, resulting in a set of anonymous biomarkers such as facial muscle actions or tone of voice,” Valstar says. “This data can, with the permission of the user, be shared with a pharmaceutical company (as part of a clinical trial) or taken to show their doctor.”
He notes that delivery partners that integrate B-Healthy into their software will need to form an agreement with the end users to share biomarker data.
The Blueskeye AI technology gets integrated into customized apps such as a menopausal mental health app, and these customized apps might be integrated into electronic health records (EHRs) depending on the delivery partner, according to Valstar.
“One thing is sure, though,” Valstar adds. “People’s faces, videos, and voice recordings will never be shared with a health provider.”
Wearables and cameras can be intrusive, but Caspar.ai uses AI to collect vital data in a less invasive manner. It collects health markers such as health rate, respiration rate, sleep analytics, and activity levels. Caregivers can view dashboards on data such as the number of restless hours at night, including an Insomnia Index and Sleep Duration marker. It also tracks respiration rates and heart rates hourly.
“Caspar.ai builds a patient-centric model with generative AI, performing a longitudinal analysis to identify 20-plus health and wellness markers like cardiac and respiratory issues, medication side effects, sleep analysis, restlessness, etc,” Ashutosh Saxena, cofounder and CEO of Caspar.ai, tells InformationWeek via email.
He adds that Caspar.ai’s passive sensing AI uses contactless radar sensors without a need for wearables or cameras. Providers can access data from the platform using an API or view the dashboard to see data and intelligent alerts.
When patients use more invasive techniques, they often fail to adhere to an RPM program, Saxena suggests. When remote monitoring is contactless and continuous, it can collect data without patient involvement.
As health IT leaders consider which contactless monitoring solutions to adopt, they should prioritize platforms with easy setup that do not cause alert fatigue, according to Saxena.
“While choosing a solution, it is important to look at one that provides a comprehensive view, integrates easily, minimizes alert fatigue, and helps improve outcomes,” Saxena says.
Circadia Health’s health monitoring system includes a disc that sits on a wall and acts as a radar to detect changes in a patient’s condition. The company offers contactless, continuous monitoring of respiratory rates and provides this data every 3 seconds. Meanwhile, FDA has cleared the Circadia platform for use in long-term care facilities.
A study recently published in Frontiers in Medicine revealed that continuous monitoring of respiratory rate of patients with COVID-19 could enable care 24 hours before a patient was at high risk of clinical deterioration.
"Continuous noncontact ventilatory monitoring has enormous potential in hospitalized patients, nursing home residents, and in the community,” Dr. Daniel I. Sessler, professor of outcomes research at the Cleveland Clinic and senior author of the study, said in a statement.
By using the Circadia wall-based radar, Belair Nursing and Rehabilitation Center was able to detect conditions such as bronchitis, pneumonia, and urinary tract infections two to three days ahead of time, National Health Care Associates, which operates short-term rehabilitation and long-term care centers throughout the Northeast, shared in a video case study.
“We’re finding infections usually two to three days ahead of time, which is a game-changer because now we’re able to treat in place,” said Ann Spenard, DNP, RN, chief clinical officer for NHCA, in the video. “We’re not transferring out to the hospital, so we’re reducing admissions, readmissions [and] ED visits.”
Circadia Health’s health monitoring system includes a disc that sits on a wall and acts as a radar to detect changes in a patient’s condition. The company offers contactless, continuous monitoring of respiratory rates and provides this data every 3 seconds. Meanwhile, FDA has cleared the Circadia platform for use in long-term care facilities.
A study recently published in Frontiers in Medicine revealed that continuous monitoring of respiratory rate of patients with COVID-19 could enable care 24 hours before a patient was at high risk of clinical deterioration.
"Continuous noncontact ventilatory monitoring has enormous potential in hospitalized patients, nursing home residents, and in the community,” Dr. Daniel I. Sessler, professor of outcomes research at the Cleveland Clinic and senior author of the study, said in a statement.
By using the Circadia wall-based radar, Belair Nursing and Rehabilitation Center was able to detect conditions such as bronchitis, pneumonia, and urinary tract infections two to three days ahead of time, National Health Care Associates, which operates short-term rehabilitation and long-term care centers throughout the Northeast, shared in a video case study.
“We’re finding infections usually two to three days ahead of time, which is a game-changer because now we’re able to treat in place,” said Ann Spenard, DNP, RN, chief clinical officer for NHCA, in the video. “We’re not transferring out to the hospital, so we’re reducing admissions, readmissions [and] ED visits.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, patients increasingly turned to telehealth sessions to seek care. And while they may not always be able to evaluate a patient in person, physicians used remote patient monitoring to evaluate patients remotely.
Meanwhile, a category of RPM called contactless health monitoring has emerged that is less invasive and many use artificial intelligence to monitor vital signs. AI allows physicians to analyze patient data and set parameters for early detection or intervention, according to Shahid Shah, a digital health/life sciences entrepreneur and publisher of Medigy Innovation Network, a crowdsourced peer community of clinicians, patients, developers, and healthcare vendors.
“Since contactless physiologic monitoring produces streaming data with pretty high fidelity, AI algorithms tend to work well given the structured nature of data,” Shah tells InformationWeek via email.
Machine learning can be effective in RPM, and generative AI assists in developing reports that are both patient- and provider-facing, he adds.
When considering contactless patient monitoring solutions, IT leaders should pilot a single contactless patient monitoring solution to see if it is a fit for a health system’s operations, Shah advises.
In addition, Shah says providers should stay current on government regulations that impact RPM platforms as healthcare standards evolve. For example, in October 2023 the FDA released its “Enforcement Policy for Non-Invasive Remote Monitoring Devices Used to Support Patient Monitoring” to provide guidance on the use of wireless patient monitoring devices amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The FDA expressed flexibility to allow for noninvasive devices that reduce the exposure of providers and patients to COVID.
Going forward, expect to see more AI solutions integrated with contactless health monitoring solutions, Shah predicts.
“AI enables accurate analysis of complex healthcare data from wearable devices and IoT sensors, facilitating early detection of health issues and personalized interventions,” Shah says. “Healthcare organizations recognize AI's potential to improve patient outcomes, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce costs, further accelerating its adoption in contactless monitoring solutions.”
Contactless health monitoring devices will appear as part of their everyday routines, notes Dr. Keith Thompson, chief medical officer at NuraLogix.
“We can expect the technologies to be built into an increasing amount of every device, paving the way to a world where health vitals are continually monitored with just a look at a smartphone, bathroom mirror, TV screen, or kiosk,” Thompson tells InformationWeek via email.
Thompson predicts that contactless health monitoring will appear in the insurance industry to help with underwriting, as part of corporate employee assistance programs (EAPs) to integrate into health apps, and as part of telehealth sessions.
Check out the following slide show to learn more about how some innovative contactless health monitoring platforms work.
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