Sam Liu, vice president at Vivalink, explains how the company’s wearable sensors have been developed, and used by key workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
First of all, give us some insight into Vivalink’s wearable devices?
Vivalink’s approach to medical wearables is more than just hardware. We provide an edge-to-cloud data platform that consists of wearable sensors, IoT network management, and cloud data services. In addition, the wearable devices include software and algorithms to ensure quality and integrity in ambulatory and remote settings.
What materials and technology have you used to bring the devices to life?
Our wearable ECG and Temperature patches are made of biocompatible silicone and other medical grade materials to provide a combination of comfort, flexibility, and durability for the user. The patches are reusable, and they use a disposable medical grade adhesive to adhere to the body.
In the COVID age, has this been a particular boom for such devices?
Absolutely. There was always an interest in adopting remote patient monitoring (RPM) technologies, but COVID has helped to accelerate it. COVID is impacting the bottom line of healthcare providers and disrupting pharmaceutical clinical trials due the avoidance of physical contact. In both situations, the use of RPM technologies can alleviate the problem.
Following on from that, have these devices been used in exactly the kind of way you imagined, or have you found additional uses for them?
Vivalink products have been used as they were intended, but we were also surprised that some hospitals were interested in using RPM within the hospital. One example is in Shanghai where hospitals were using RPM to allow nurses to monitor COVID patients from a distance, but still within the hospital. We’ve also seen interest in situations where the hospital doesn’t have traditional patient monitors due to costs but are looking at wearables as a lower cost alternative.
Are there any more wearables in the pipeline?
We continue to innovate our platform from wearables to the data services. We’re looking to add additional vitals and biometrics onto the same wearable, as well as new wearables or sensors.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Ultimately, it’s about the data and the insights that can be derived from it. Thus, it’s important to understand that the innovation doesn’t lie only with the hardware, but requires a combination of hardware, software, and algorithms to truly develop a compelling solution for RPM. And that is Vivalink’s approach to medical wearables.
