Philips, Defense Department Expand mHealth Project for Infection Tracking

September 22, 2020 - The Department of Defense is working with Philips to create a telehealth platform that would remotely monitor service members for infectious diseases, including the coronavirus.

Officials say the project, an expansion of the ongoing Rapid Analysis of Threat Exposure (RATE) program, may someday be used by health systems to triage patients and businesses to determine whether their employees are healthy enough to go to work.

Developed by Philips in a partnership with the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), the RATE program uses mHealth technology, including wearables, and AI tools to analyze biological markers for exposure to infectious agents, including viruses. With growing numbers of service members becoming infected by COVID-19, the connected health platform is being expanded to identify early signs of coronavirus infection.

“RATE would allow us to non-invasively monitor a service member’s health and provide early alerts to potential infection that will help us to ensure troop readiness, better support their health and protect against the threat of further spread of the disease,” Edward Argenta, DRTA’s science and technology manager, said in a press release. “Unlike other more narrow approaches, this solution is designed to recognize a wide variety of infections and can help identify future novel threats.”

“By combining commercial technology, a rich data source and simple to use wearables, we are effectively providing a check-engine light on the military service member and getting that alert before they’re broken down with a disease,” added Christian Whitchurch, PhD, DIU’s human systems portfolio director. “In military speak, we’re targeting left-of-cough awareness.”

The project is one of several aiming to use telehealth and mHealth to remotely monitor people for signs of infection, and not the first launched by the military. The DoD, for example, is working with Chicago-based physIQ on a project that uses mHealth wearables in military hospitals to identify new ways of detecting and treating COVID-19.

Past programs have seen the military use Fitbits to track the health of service members, as well as other mHealth devices and platforms to conduct respiratory exams, track sleep patterns and pain, identify concussive hits to the heads and aid in the treatment of PTSD.

“Through the RATE, researchers discovered that exposure to infectious agents causes subtle changes in people’s physiology before they experience symptoms,” the press release explained. “Identifying these changes early in the infection is critical to containing the spread, as asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic individuals don’t yet show signs of infection, and can unwittingly spread the disease to others. An early warning solution could potentially alert people of their possible infection, and enable them to quarantine and change their behaviors sooner to avoid infecting others.”

Officials say the RATE program is being modified to work with a wide variety of mHealth wearables, and may someday by integrated into a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program that takes advantage of the consumer-facing health and wellness market. It would also have civilian uses.

“The RATE science shows that physiological response to infection has similarities across different types of infectious agents, and we anticipate that this will also apply to RATE-COVID, giving us a useful early warning solution,” Joe Frassica, Philips’ chief medical officer and head of the company’s Research North America unit, said in the press release. “As we continue to get new data from monitored cases of COVID-19, we will be able to refine the RATE-COVID algorithm in the near future. We hope that this will not only allow us to protect people from contracting the disease, but to also intervene early and treat those who are infected.”