During this year’s catastrophic pandemic, many companies, universities, and research institutions directed their development efforts to find ways to detect, diagnose, protect, or even prevent COVID-19. We’ve covered our fair share of devices and technologies. We’ve written about apps such as Brainworks’ Medio Smart Health that uses AI to assign users a COVID-19 risk score based on vital signs and answers to symptom-related questions. We covered the Ohmni Robot that minimizes patient-provider contact in hospitals. We even featured North Carolina State University’s Assist Center; an incubator focused on advancing wearable solutions for COVID-19.
In April, we wrote about Boston-based Whoop, a three-pillar COVID-19 detection platform that includes biometric sensing hardware, AI-powered data analytics, and an active user community. Last week, G42 Healthcare, an Abu Dhabi-based digital health and medical technology company, announced a partnership with Whoop. The two firms will offer Whoop wearables and health monitoring biometrics to volunteers participating in the first Phase III trials of an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine. The partnership is named Whoop4Humanity.
Clinical trial volunteers in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, a large city in the United Arab Emirates, will use the Whoop wearable to check their daily heart rates, respiratory rate, heart rate variability, and more. In addition to helping clinical trial volunteers with confidence-building daily health metrics, the data collected from the joint platform will add to the research data points during the trial as volunteers track changes to their health. According to Whoop Founder and CEO Will Ahmed, continuous monitoring and artificial intelligence will assist the researchers’ understanding of the vaccines. The Phase III vaccine trials began July 16 and will last for six to 12 months.
No one planned it this way, but pandemic-related applications of wearable biometric sensors, remote monitoring, and AI-powered health-related analytics are one of the few bright lights in the dark presence of COVID-19.
