Employing AI and Remote Patient Monitoring in the Fight Against COVID-19

A new collaboration between Current Health and Mayo Clinic will combine artificial intelligence and remote patient management to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

Edinburgh-based Current Health said the collaboration is aimed at accelerating the identification of COVID-19-positive patients and predict symptom and disease severity in patients, healthcare workers, and other at-risk individuals in critical service sectors.

To do this, digital biomarkers collected by Current Health’s FDA-cleared remote monitoring sensors and platform will be used.

"We currently help manage care for hundreds of patients infected with the coronavirus, and we saw an opportunity to use patient data to better understand how the coronavirus presents and evolves across diverse populations," Chris McCann, CEO and Co-Founder, Current Health, told MD+DI. "Through this collaboration, we believe we can add to Mayo Clinic’s major advancements in accelerating COVID-19 detection and diagnosis, and further efforts to understand and treat this disease."

The next stage is to use digital biomarkers collected by the Current Health solutions, such as temperature, heart rate, oxygen saturation, activity and posture, to develop AI-based algorithms that can detect and predict symptom and disease severity to enable proactive treatment.

This collaboration will use Current Health’s existing patient database – which already includes anonymized vital sign data and raw physiological sensor data from hundreds of patients infected with COVID-19 and thousands of uninfected patients – as well as algorithms developed by Mayo Clinic, which will be used to provide individualized care to patients with complex and critical medical conditions.

“Real-world, continuous data – from patients infected and not infected with the disease – is essential to understanding and predicting how the disease presents and evolves,” Abinash Virk, MD, an infectious disease expert at Mayo Clinic, said in a release. “If we are successful in accomplishing our goals, we believe we will improve how patients with COVID-19 are identified, monitored, managed, and ultimately help with their recovery.”

McCann said AI could be a difference-maker in providing needs for patients during the COVID-19 crisis. 

"A pandemic generates far more patients and it reduces the available number of healthcare professionals to treat those patients," he said. "AI can act as a triage tool, identifying those patients who need attention and channeling them to healthcare professionals so they can focus on delivering healthcare."

Mayo Clinic is slated to become an investor in Current Health. And speaking of investments, the firm raised $11.5 million in a series A round in late 2019. The company was formed in 2015 and is formerly known as snap40.

The collaboration comes at a time when there are 3.2 million COVID-19 cases worldwide with 225,617 deaths, according to worldometers. The website shows that 986, 622 people have recovered from the virus.