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Per a story on CSO, events worldwide over the past few years have caused problems in how healthcare professionals measure and monitor a patient’s vital signs. New rules around sanitation and the usage of personal protection equipment.
create a challenge to healthcare providers who need new ways to measure a patient’s vital signs safely or to triage patients in an emergency room crisis faster.
Today, inventions in sensors, signal and image processing, and machine learning allow providers to use video analysis to estimate vital signs such as heart rate, oxygenation, and respiratory rate. New techniques for unlocking data from the video are available, supplying insights beyond what the eye can see and decreasing the need for healthcare equipment such as wearable gadgets, thermometers, and other physical, vital sign measurement equipment.
Transforming this space is Presage Technologies, which has developed its Vitals by Video platform to offer continuous, passive vital sign measurements for healthcare providers and patients. Utilizing any camera – including those in webcams and smartphones – the platform can specify vital signs such as heart rate and respiration information and the quality of these signals. It calculates minute, nearly invisible color shifts in a patient’s face between oxygenated and deoxygenated blood when the heart pulsates.
The pandemic presented a great need for a safer way to measure vital signs that upheld patients and providers safe in their environment. This yielded a demand for remote healthcare and telemedicine, which Presage’s technology allows. Presage’s explainable algorithms can notice and measure changes in dynamic conditions, for instance, while on a treadmill or in low-light situations.
Instead of developing their specific hardware device, Presage supplies access for other developers to use the platform in their applications, machines, or use cases. For instance, the platform is easily integrated into a baby monitor, permitting a manufacturer to provide parents additional data on their baby’s health past audio and video. In another illustration, neonatal intensive care units that already utilize video cameras to monitor babies can now pull vital signs from the cameras instead of attaching wires, cables, and additional sensors to the newborn patients. With the technology embedded inside a smartphone or app, military doctors or emergency first responders can calculate vital signs for field triage objectives. Because the use cases are limitless, Presage wants to entitle other companies to partner with them to develop the right solution for their distinctive device or app.
Developers can employ Presage’s technology in several ways. The platform can be instantly embedded into a video camera, such as a baby monitor or other component of hardware, or it can be integrated indirectly by creating an API call to Presage. The company is assembling its API available for free to developers who desire to test the Vitals by Video platform for themselves.
“The API is nice when people are reasoning out what their use case is, because it lets us to quickly jump in and look at any issues they’re having,” speaks Rick Getz, Chief Technology Officer at Presage. “We can then walk them via the process before we hit the large-scale presentation of putting it onto an individual device or developing it for a distinct application.”
