French Company Is Developing a T-Shirt to Monitor Sleep Apnea

As part of the Coalition Innovation Santé – Crise Sanitaire initiative, Chronolife and Servier are collaborating to accelerate the deployment of a noninvasive telemonitoring solution which aims to facilitate remote monitoring of chronic patients during the COVID-19 pandemic and enable healthcare professionals to provide better patient care.

Due to high hospital bed occupancy rates in intensive care units, usual monitoring of vulnerable patients with chronic diseases is more difficult. To improve patient care, medical devices using trackers, blood pressure monitors, thermometers, and scales are often used to improve disease management, allowing for better long-term monitoring, and reduced avoidable re-hospitalizations. However, their constraints often result in problems with patient compliance.

So Paris, France-based Chronolife has developed a smart t-shirt integrating multiple sensors and a smartphone application for the remote monitoring of patients. Keesense is a medical device marked CE Class IIa that allows for the continuous monitoring of 6 physiological parameters (electrocardiogram, physical activity, abdominal and thoracic breathing, skin temperature, and pulmonary impedance to detect edemas). Chronolife expects to receive FDA clearance for its Keesense solution by next year (2021), to commercialize the product in the United States. The measurement of these parameters, in association with the Be-Ys platform—a company developing technological tools to manage digital identities and personal and confidential data flows, can highlight significant changes in the patient’s overall health to medical providers. The machine washable t-shirt is easy to use. An interface developed by Be-Ys and already deployed across several French hospital centers, allows healthcare professionals to access and interpret these physiological parameters so that they can make the appropriate therapeutic decisions.

“We are very proud to be selected by the Coalition Innovation Santé for the remote and at-home monitoring of patients with chronic diseases using our medical device certified connected t-shirt, which can monitor multiple vital parameters continuously. The comfortable and machine washable t-shirt, guarantees greater patient compliance with telemonitoring services, and could contribute to a better quality of life,” says Laurent Vandebrouck, CEO of Chronolife, in a release. “We are working on several chronic conditions and use-cases such as heart failure, sleep apnea, as well as postoperative follow-up in order to bring to these patients the benefits of real world continuous remote monitoring.”

With a focus on cardiology, Servier has decided to support Chronolife in the carrying out of an experiment on the remote monitoring of 40 patients with chronic heart failure. The aim is to determine whether the smart t-shirt provides useful information to medical practitioners during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as assess its use in regular clinical practice. This will also be the opportunity to use the t-shirt in a real-world setting and monitor patients enrolled in a hospital telemonitoring program.

“We are very happy to support Chronolife in deploying their medical device that contributes to improving the continuum of care for patients with chronic diseases and to help facilitate the work of healthcare professionals, especially in this time of crisis,” says Olivier Nosjean, Servier research scientific director, in a release.

from Sleep Review https://ift.tt/2EZeHBF