Jewish General counting on app in battle vs. coronavirus

Medical staff and patients at the Jewish General Hospital will be using a potentially powerful new tool in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in the coming days — a smartphone app that will allow users to monitor their vital signs by simply staring into their phone’s screen.

The medical-grade app, developed by a Tel Aviv company in collaboration with a Montreal health technology firm, is believed to be the first of its kind in the world. Although the app was not designed with COVID-19 in mind, the Jewish General will be using it in three ways during the pandemic.

Starting as early as next week, triage nurses will use the app to screen arriving emergency-room patients for telltale symptoms. They will hold a smartphone in front of a patient’s face and in less than a minute the app will measure three vital signs: heart rate, respiratory rate and oxygen saturation in the blood.

Patients with abnormally elevated heart and respiratory rates as well a low oxygen-saturation reading will be isolated for further investigation. The hospital will also use the app in COVID-19 wards, giving it to patients so they can monitor their vital signs. This should result in nurses entering their rooms less frequently, which will help conserve the scarce supply of gloves, masks and other personal protective equipment.

The app will also be downloaded by some vulnerable patients in Montreal’s west end, which has reported the highest concentration of COVID-19 cases in the city, to let people monitor their symptoms at home.

The hospital is completing testing the app’s accuracy on-site, and given the early positive results, has shared it with the Quebec Health Ministry. The provincial government is considering introducing the smartphone technology across the province, with the goal of reducing the size of a possible second wave of COVID-19 cases.

Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg, executive director of the health authority in charge of the Jewish General, said the app has the potential to be a game-changer.

“It should allow us to pick up people who are virus-positive but who have subtle or early symptoms that we wouldn’t be able to pick up previously until they came to an emergency room,” Rosenberg said.

Quebec Premier François Legault has extended the closing of non-essential businesses until May 4.

“Whether it’s May 4 — a week earlier or a week later — people will have to start coming out,” Rosenberg said.

“That will be a time when having the app widely available will be useful because people can then start screening themselves for things like O2 saturation and their respiratory rate. Then (some) will either go back into isolation or go to the emergency room. But it will keep them off the street.”

Binah.ai, a Tel Aviv company, developed the underlying technology, which is used by the Montreal firm Carebook Technologies Inc. for the COVID -19 app.

Fitness trackers like Fitbit rely on light pulses against the skin to monitor for things like one’s heart rate. The Israeli company takes this a step further. The app uses a smartphone’s camera to capture the light on a person’s cheeks below the eyes.

Artificial intelligence measures how light goes through the skin beneath the cheeks into the blood capillaries.

The technology, so far tested successfully on 13,000 people, can be downloaded on an iphone 8 or higher and on Samsung models 7 and up.

Sheldon Elman is a staff physician at the Jewish General and the chairman of Carebook.

“We are not a screening tool for COVID,” he said. “We are a screening tool for vital signs, which then in certain situations can tell you whether a change in your vital signs could indicate a deterioration that could be very much COVID -related.”

Carebook has already applied to Health Canada for approval of the technology. However, Rosenberg said the given the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic, the Jewish General will roll it out shortly.