Grant: Alliance Grants

This partnership will develop technology for discovering COVID19 early symptoms by using contactless optical monitoring of cardiovascular and respiratory system parameters via a smartphone. New findings show that among other symptoms, there are 3 parameters which are changing in combination as early signs of COVID19: increases of the respiratory and heart rates (HR, RR) and decrease of heart rate variability (HRV) Monitoring all 3 parameters can be a reliable alarm of the beginning of COVID19 development, triggering an urgent test request for the accurate diagnostics. Our industrial partner, Swift Medical seeks a partnership to develop a remote, contactless smartphone-based system for monitoring of HR, RR, and HRV parameters, which will be generating a warning message, once the parameters change beyond the normal range. This system can be also used for monitoring the patient during COVID19 progression, and the data collected can be used to develop a forecast algorithm predicting the moment of intensive care or emergency call. Both front and back camera of the smartphone can be employed: the front camera can be used for self-assessment and the back camera can be used for screening other people. The impact of this project will support medical personnel with user-friendly equipment for fast discovery of threatening cardiovascular and respiratory symptoms during the current pandemic as well as for the future. Managing and sorting patients at emergency, ambulance, in the clinics or long-care facilities requires a quick screening technology to discover individuals with early signs of COVID19 that may save their lives and lives of people around them.