SBIR Phase I: MouthLab - A Medical Tricorder Optimized for Real-time, Rapid Assessment of COVID-19 Patients And Those At Risk

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to advance the development of a novel, rapid COVID-19 symptoms assessment and real-time monitoring tool for individuals as well as infected patients and their care providers. The ability to detect all the early/progressive COVID-19 symptoms are invaluable to limit the rapid spread of disease and reduce the overwhelming demand for healthcare facilities, medical supplies, and front-line personnel. Currently, clinical care for COVID-19 is limited to hospitals and traditional healthcare facilities. Unfortunately, physicians still use temperature or subjective symptom data as the sole predictor of infection/disease status. This project will demonstrate a hand-held device to measure 10+ vital health parameters relevant to COVID-19 in just 30 seconds, and a cloud-based triage platform that leverages AI and machine learning algorithms to create a unique remote-monitoring solution for people who are infected or susceptible to life-threatening complications due to COVID-19. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to customize a device and platform for remote detection and management of COVID-19. This project will advance the development of a device design for remote use and modify the communication protocol to allow the platform to function reliably, even in areas with low cellular network connectivity. Secondly, the project will design a user interface to include a health status indicator via a weighting system optimized for specific parameters (e.g. breathing rate, SpO2, spirometry, temperature). This will enable even general users to understand their health/disease trends based on underlying data and analytics. The proposed project aims to build secure APIs for integrating with existing EMRs to provide data to health systems and federal agencies. Finally, the project will develop an integrated COVID-19 surveillance/triage dashboard for providers and military medics to receive real-time biometric data across populations and geographies to ensure timely intervention and treatment modification. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.