Announcing Empatica Care, a new way to remotely monitor the health of thousands

EmpaticaMay 13, 2020•8 min read

The ability to constantly monitor the health of multiple individuals with limited physical contact has never been more important than it is today.

As hospitals across the world became inundated with COVID-19 cases, being able to provide clinical care to patients with other, chronic conditions, or milder cases of COVID-19 infection, has become increasingly challenging.

At the same time, healthcare workers, but also other workers in occupations that are unable to perform remote working, such as production lines, transport and food services, remain more exposed to COVID-19, and a potential infection could accelerate the spread within their workplace.

At Empatica, our mission remains to make groundbreaking technology that is friendly, caring and more human, in order to unlock better health outcomes for millions. For the past months, we have been working hard to deliver a new solution that makes the best of our existing technology and expertise, as we fight our collective battle against COVID-19 and transition into a new reality and landscape for healthcare.

That is why today we are extremely proud to announce that we have taken our years of expertise in creating medical wearables, biomarkers and healthcare platforms, and have built a platform that will enable the continuous, nonintrusive vital signs monitoring of people, no matter where they are: Empatica Care.

What is Empatica Care?

Empatica Care is a new remote patient monitoring platform, that will give healthcare workers and caregivers the ability to monitor the vital signs of thousands from a single dashboard, all collected using Empatica’s CE-certified smartband, the E4.

It can be used to monitor both mild or severe illness, for all inpatients, even those in the ICU, or all types of outpatients. The conditions it can cover are endless, ranging from surgical, medical or oncology patients, to hemodialysis patients and the elderly who are at home. It can also monitor healthy individuals who may be at risk of infection. Our goal was to create a solution that can work both for patients who may be isolated inside a hospital or at home, but also for non-isolated patients that don’t require frequent check-ins by a nurse.

Empatica Care is AI-powered, and made to fit in the lives of healthy individuals, patients and providers with ease. The platform is built on our existing technology, that has been successfully used for years by some of the world’s top research institutions, facilitating the data streaming by thousands of individuals to a single dashboard.

The overall experience for users is easy, non-invasive and passive. They only have to wear an unobtrusive, comfortable smartband, and keep an app on their phones or smart devices.

Collect objective, accurate data with the E4

Data is collected using the E4, a wrist-worn, medical-grade wearable that is already being used by hundreds of researchers to reach groundbreaking discoveries via the real-time streaming of physiological responses to external stimuli in real-life settings. The E4 packs a combination of powerful sensors that collect key vitals such as heart rate, heart rate variability, peripheral temperature, and respiration rate and oxygen saturation, and communicates this data to the Care App via Bluetooth.

Let users connect to their health data with the Care App

The Care App has been designed to be user-friendly, and to show users the data that is being streamed to the Care Dashboard, with no need for self-reporting. The E4 connects to the app via Bluetooth, just like most wearable trackers.

The Care App keeps the wearer connected to their healthcare provider, health observer or caregiver while keeping them in control via access to key information:

Pulse rate monitoring
Temperature monitoring
System status updates
E4 connectivity updates
A secure, continuous stream of data to the HIPAA-compliant Empatica cloud

Review the vital signs of thousands on the Care Portal

The data that gets transferred to the cloud by the E4 is automatically gathered and visualized inside the new Empatica Care Portal, a powerful online tool that provides professionals with instant access to the real-time vitals of individuals who may be at work, at home, or in a different ward inside your hospital.

We know your time is precious, so we have summarized some of the key features of the Care Portal below, but [our team](mailto: care@empatica.com) is at hand to answer any questions you may have.

1. With the Care Portal, you can monitor the health of your outpatients and inpatients simultaneously, while switching between Sites from inside the dashboard. The Site View provides a quick view of a range of vital signs.

2. This data can be compared against the trends of the previous hours or days.

3. It will also let you know if someone is not wearing the E4 properly, so you can inform them.

4. The Patient View then enables a deep dive into specific user biomarkers, in case you notice something that you’d like to investigate further.

5. The solution is designed to scale, and adding new users is extremely easy, secure, and confidential since it can be done via the dashboard, which generates a unique login and identifier for every individual.

6. Any member of a medical team that has been registered on the Care Portal can access the same Sites, enabling simultaneous assessment by multiple healthcare professionals.

Who is Empatica Care for?

Empatica Care is made to be used by any organization or system that wants to continuously monitor the health of multiple people simultaneously without frequent interactions with a clinician.

Within healthcare, the remote monitoring of patients can help identify cases that require medical assistance, enable early intervention, reduce ER visits by high-risk individuals, reduce hospital readmission, and keep healthcare workers safe. Simultaneously, it allows people with chronic conditions to have their health monitored from the comfort of their home, with their physician monitoring their day-to-day vitals, seeing trends. This can make communication with the patient more effective and data-driven, and give caregivers and clinicians objective indicators to decide whether intervention is needed.

Another potential and more imminent, use is for mild COVID-19 cases. This includes both individuals who are self-isolating and can be onboarded with Empatica Care without leaving their house, or patients that have recovered from COVID-19 and have been discharged from the hospital, but could still be within a high-risk group because of their medical co-morbidities. These patients can be enrolled into the Care platform post-discharge, and get sent home with an E4.

Empatica Care can be used by healthcare providers, employers, researchers, the public service, or even individuals who want to keep a closer eye on their loved ones.