(This article originally appeared in
Healthcare Call Center Times in December 2020.)
NEW YORK, NY—Remote patient monitoring has come a long way in recent years in being able to assess a patient’s status and communicate that to providers for analysis and, in outlier cases, action. The New York-based Somatix has added a new wrinkle to the data that can be gleaned from remote monitoring: SafeBeing™, a system that provides gesture detection. The patient wears a waterproof smartband provided by the company (it also works with many commercial smartwatches) that can track the activities of daily living through understanding the gestures that patients make.
Through the company’s technology, for example, it can pick up the patient’s drinking pattern during the course of the day and if the beverage was hot or cold. For instance, the process of drinking a glass of water is markedly different from drinking hot tea in the way that the arm grips the cup and the duration of the sip, says Co-founder and CEO Eran Ofir.
Understanding how much liquid the patient is drinking can be an important thing to know for patients recently discharged from the hospital. Also important are such things as sleep patterns. This technology can record the quality of sleep through, in part, recording how many times the patient woke up, what they did when they woke up (e.g. sat up bolt upright or casually went back to bed), and how many times they got up to go to the bathroom.
One of the more interesting elements of this technology is that it can capture the gestures people make to smoke. So, for example, a CHF patient with a history of smoking is told that they must give up smoking. Then, if they are monitored, the system will pick up if they indeed did give it up or snuck in a cigarette or more. Details learned include such things as number of puffs and time of day along with an analysis of correlation with readmission risk for lung disease.
However, Ofir says, the system can’t distinguish between smoking a cigarette and smoking a joint. So, there could be occasions where a newly discharged patient is smoking a joint for pain control, but is not smoking a cigarette. In those cases, the nursing call center would need to follow up with the patient.
Data from the patient’s wearable can be transmitted back to the call center, via a dashboard, and can be combined with data from other remote monitoring to get a picture of the patient’s situation. Then, “we can send reminders to them through the app,” he says. “We can do an intervention in real time based on the context of what people are doing.”