In early 2017, we wrote about a shift in wearable health tech to clinical grade devices. The market was slowing for basic fitness trackers but interest in wearables from the medical and research communities was a driving force for high-quality health and medical monitoring devices. The growth of telemedicine relies on wearables with biometric sensors so care teams can monitor patient status and compliance.
Israel-based Biobeat announced a pair of wearable devices as part of a full hardware and software suite that continuously monitors a wide range of patient vital signs for physicians and other health care providers. The Biobeat suite includes a wristwatch, a single-use patch, a smartphone app for patients, and hospital screens and workstations. The Biobeat Watch has a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor, galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor, temperature sensing, and an accelerometer. The Biobeat Patch is a single-use device good for up to 10 days. The Patch has the same the list of sensors as the watch, and adds a single-lead ECG. In addition to the ECG report with the Patch only, both wearables report 16 health-related factors, ranging from heart rate variability and continuous blood pressure to blood oxygen saturation, sweat, sleep quality, movement, and calories consumed.
Patients can use the Biobeat App on their smartphone to monitor their own vital signs, note data about medications, and interact with the care team. All data is saved in Biobeat’s HIPAA- and GDPR-compliant cloud. Healthcare staff can use the Biobeat screens on tablets or workstations to monitor all vital signs simultaneously. The system also allows alert limits configured for each metric. The recorded and stored data eliminates the need for staff to record vital signs.
The comprehensive Biobeat hardware and software suite isn’t a consumer product, but it does serve as a good example of the direction in which wearables are headed. Wearables that produce continuously tracked, aggregated, and reported clinical-grade health and medical data across a wide biometric spectrum is a big step up from devices that were a novelty just a few years ago.
