Last year, Bio Conscious released Endobits, an innovative remote patient monitoring system for physicians that automatically prioritizes high-risk patients and allows for remote consults. Endobits is a companion to Bio Conscious’ flagship diabetes management platform Diabits, which predicts an individual’s blood sugar levels up to an hour in advance.

Now Bio Conscious is working on a new addition to Endobits that will use an algorithm to enable healthcare providers to collect a patient’s temperature, listen to their cough, and identify possible positive cases of COVID-19 based on sound data.

We talked with Bio Conscious CEO Amir Hayeri on how Endobits fights the spread of COVID-19 with real-time access to data.

VentureLabs (VL): You’ve said before that reactive disease management means healthcare money is not being used most effectively. And while early intervention can improve treatment outcomes, the key to reducing the public burden of disease is to identify and prevent disease altogether. How does Bio Conscious shift clinical care from being reactive to proactive?

Amir Hayeri: In the last 60 years, major advances have been made in procedures for treating disease. While investment in the medical sector has been massive, it has produced almost exclusively reactive treatments where interventions are always facing backwards. Prevention of disease and complications has taken a back seat. Today, treatment doesn’t address cause, but rather is only administered to patients who are already suffering from disease and whose lives are already irrevocably altered.

Let’s look at an example. Glucose metabolism is the fundamental process that powers metabolism and a key indicator of general health.

Bio Conscious first started by modeling glucose metabolism to help patients with glucose anomalies. The core technology that we are developing has implications for acute and chronic conditions beyond diabetes, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, and more. In the last three years Bio Conscious has focused its efforts on patients with diabetes who require help managing their blood sugar by building Diabits, a unique diabetes management app that uses machine learning to predict blood sugar levels up to 60 minutes in advance.

VL: You recently launched a new product – Endobits. Tell us more about how it works.

Amir: Endobits is a companion to Diabits for physicians. Endobits is a remote patient monitoring platform for physicians. It uses proprietary machine learning technology to integrate wearable and medical sensor data to actively monitor a patient population and prioritize patients based on critical events and treatment adherence. Endobits helps clinicians better triage and focus their time on patients who need care the most.

Endobits was created to address the shortage of care in the diabetes-related healthcare system. Not everyone is able to see their specialist when they need them, and sometimes not at all, especially during the COVID-19 crisis. 

Clinics also have trouble because of the number of patients relying on their services. Most don’t have enough time in the day, and none are able to properly prioritize clients to help those that need them the most.

We designed Endobits to alleviate these problems. Using Endobits, physicians can automatically see Diabits user’s data. Endobits is device agnostic, so physicians are able to view all their client’s data in one place regardless of how they manage their diabetes and what devices they use.

VL: During the COVID-19 crisis, healthcare professionals are extremely busy. How can Endobits free up time for endocrinologists so they can focus on the patients who need help and provide the best possible care to those who need it most?

Amir: The Endobits dashboard provides the clinician with an easy to read a summary of each patient’s health and access to data tags. Additionally, Endobits performs automatic triage, flagging users as ‘High Priority’ if they have recently experienced clinically relevant events. The clinician can quickly see who needs to be attended to, dig deeper into their data and reports, and contact the patient if necessary.

Endobits provides decision support by automatically recommending areas of focus to help with treatment success. The Endobits dashboard view lets care providers know who is most at risk and why.

During COVID-19 this means that only patients requiring immediate attention will need to make the trip into the clinic, reducing stress on the health care system as well as increasing safety for high-risk diabetes patients.

VL: Bio Conscious has also recently announced the addition of a data collection system in Endobits that will be able to identify possible positive cases of COVID-19?

Amir: Yes, in the near future the data collection system in Endobits will be configured to use a machine learning algorithm that collects temperature information, listens to a patient’s cough, and identifies possible positive cases of COVID-19 based on sound data. This innovation means that Endobits has the potential to be used for remote monitoring of patients with COVID-19, as well as those with diabetes. This real-time access to data by (provided from Endobits) presents a significant opportunity to fight the spread of COVID-19.

VL: What’s next for Bio Conscious?

Amir: For us, it is important to expand our knowledge and understanding of daily blood sugar fluctuations and glucose metabolism in patients with diabetes and beyond. That said, the novel coronavirus has presented the world, especially healthcare startups, with new challenges and opportunities. To that end, we are focusing our attempts on exploring different ways we can use our technology to help remote monitor patients with diabetes and hypertension who are currently at high risk and provide new solutions for diagnoses and remote monitoring for patients.

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, Bio Conscious has extended the Endobits free trial to two months. Sign up for the trial at endobits.com/sign-up.

Bio Conscious is encouraging clinics and hospitals to take advantage of this offer in the hopes that Endobits will be able to reduce some stress that clinics and physicians are facing, as well as keep high-risk patients safe during COVID-19.

Read more about Endobits at www.endobits.com. Connect with Bio Conscious at www.bioconscious.tech/solutions

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