We often write about remote health monitoring technology for a variety of health conditions, rehab, post-surgery discharge, and more. This year the pandemic spurred the development of AI-based apps and devices for COVID-19 screening. For example, researchers from Oxford University and Harvard created two AI models to detect early signs of COVID-19 among patients at hospital emergency departments and hospital admissions. Researchers at Northwestern University’s engineering department and Shirley Ryan Activity Lab in Chicago developed a wireless throat patch that monitors coughs, fever, and respiratory activity and transmits the data to an AI platform for early virus detection.
If you have an Internet-connected digital device with a camera and 5 to 10 minutes to register and set it up, there’s now a free, AI-based application that will assess your current COVID-19 risk level based on your vital signs and answers to a few simple questions. Brainworks launched Medio Smart Health on August 5th. Medio Smart Health is a free personal health management application that tracks COVID-19-specific symptoms and uses AI to assign a risk score.
Once you register and log in to Medio Smart Health, you can access the application with a smartphone, tablet, or computer that is equipped with a camera. The software instructs you to keep your head and shoulders in the view of a camera monitoring window while you answer several CDC- recommended COVID-19 screening questions. You’re prompted to enter your temperature, either as measured with your own device or estimated. Next, you enter your pulse oxygenation reading if you have a device (or you may skip this question if you don’t have one). The following questions ask you to answer questions about your senses of taste and smell, breathing, cough, or chest pain, headache or confusion, muscle aches or chills, and gastrointestinal distress. The video camera in your device measures your heart rate and breathing rate based on motion detection. It also estimates your blood oxygenation based on skin tone. After you answer the questions, you can immediately view your Health Pass, an AI-generated COVID-19 risk score from 0 (high risk) to 10 (low risk). You can filter your test results by the risk score, by temperature, heart rate, breath rate, and oxygen level (the last measure is still in Beta testing, according to Brainworks).
I signed up for Medio Smart Health and logged in to try the app with an HP laptop and a Samsung Note 8. I don’t have a pulse oxygenation measurement device, but I did enter my current temperature and answered the questions. I ran the test several times (it only take about 2 minutes) and scored between 9.5 and 10 on the COVID-19 risk level chart. I don’t have a way to check the reported breath rate or blood oxygenation levels. Still, my heart rate, as measured by the app’s video data interpretation (75 to 77 beats per minute), was nearly identical to the rate as measured by my Fitbit Versa 2 smartwatch. While this is an anecdotal case with just one test subject, the Medio app returned consistent results across two devices and the results coincided with a separate third-party device.
Brainwork isn’t claiming that Medio Smart Health is a medical diagnostic tool. However, the app can give individuals and employers a way to keep track of COVID-19 related symptoms and vital signs. If you run the app frequently, you can track changes in your vital signs and history over time. If you begin to fell ill, you’ll have data to help decide if you should seek medical testing or care. If you are diagnosed with COVID-19, the app can help monitor your recovery.
