“False positives and false negatives lead to more testing and more cost to the health care system,” he said.
Big tech companies like Google have heavily invested in researching this kind of technology, catering to clinicians and in-home caregivers, as well as consumers. Currently, in the Google Fit app, users can check their heart rate by placing their finger on the rear-facing camera lens or track their breathing rate using the front-facing camera.
“If you took the sensor out of the phone and out of a clinical device, they are probably the same thing,” said Shwetak Patel, director of health technologies at Google and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington.
Google’s research uses machine learning and computer vision, a field within AI based on information from visual inputs like videos or images. So instead of using a blood pressure cuff, for example, the algorithm can interpret slight visual changes to the body that serve as proxies and biosignals for a patient’s blood pressure, Patel said.
Google is also investigating the effectiveness of the built-in microphone for detecting heartbeats and murmurs and using the camera to preserve eyesight by screening for diabetic eye disease, according to information the company published last year.
The tech giant recently purchased Sound Life Sciences, a Seattle startup with an FDA-cleared sonar technology app. It uses a smart device’s speaker to bounce inaudible pulses off a patient’s body to identify movement and monitor breathing.
Binah.ai, based in Israel, is another company using the smartphone camera to calculate vital signs. Its software looks at the region around the eyes, where the skin is a bit thinner, and analyzes the light reflecting off blood vessels back to the lens. The company is wrapping up a U.S. clinical trial and marketing its wellness app directly to insurers and other health companies, said company spokesperson Mona Popilian-Yona.
The applications even reach into disciplines such as optometry and mental health:
- With the microphone, Canary Speech uses the same underlying technology as Amazon’s Alexa to analyze patients’ voices for mental health conditions. The software can integrate with telemedicine appointments and allow clinicians to screen for anxiety and depression using a library of vocal biomarkers and predictive analytics, said Henry O’Connell, the company’s CEO.
- Australia-based ResApp Health got FDA clearance last year for its iPhone app that screens for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea by listening to breathing and snoring. SleepCheckRx, which will require a prescription, is minimally invasive compared with sleep studies currently used to diagnose sleep apnea. Those can cost thousands of dollars and require an array of tests.
- Brightlamp’s Reflex app is a clinical decision support tool for helping manage concussions and vision rehabilitation, among other things. Using an iPad’s or iPhone’s camera, the mobile app measures how a person’s pupils react to changes in light. Through machine learning analysis, the imagery gives practitioners data points for evaluating patients. Brightlamp sells directly to health care providers and is being used in more than 230 clinics. Clinicians pay a $400 standard annual fee per account, which is currently not covered by insurance. The Department of Defense has an ongoing clinical trial using Reflex.
In some cases, such as with the Reflex app, the data is processed directly on the phone — rather than in the cloud, Brightlamp CEO Kurtis Sluss said. By processing everything on the device, the app avoids running into privacy issues, as streaming data elsewhere requires patient consent.
But algorithms need to be trained and tested by collecting reams of data, and that is an ongoing process.
More Articles
- GAO: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress appropriated $2.6 trillion in emergency assistance for people, businesses, the health care system, and state and local governments. How are federal agencies administering this spending?
- Not So Fast: Mailman Public Health Biostatisticians Raise Concerns Over Ovarian Cancer Screening Study