A new mobile application and cloud-based support system designed to enable remote monitoring of human vital signs in military, disaster emergency, hospital and other settings is set to roll out in the next few months.
Adhere 2 Care Inc.’s mobile Android app transmits data captured by Bluetooth-enabled sensors or biosensor devices to a cloud-based web portal where caretakers or family members can access it. President and CEO John Hoggle said the technology is fully developed and should be ready to deploy in the U.S. and abroad when the patent process is complete in two to three months.
Currently the company is looking for $3 million in capital investment to continue working to bring the product to hospitals and the U.S. Department of Defense, and to begin marketing the platform in the Pacific Rim countries.
The U.S. military has expressed interest in Adhere 2 Care because it would allow soldiers to be located and monitored in areas without cellular service, Hoggle said. Private cellphone provider Oceus Networks, who is a partner to Adhere 2 Care, could set up a cellular switch in a truck or air ship that would allow as many as 1,000 phones in a 30- to 40-mile radius to connect and use the app, he said. When paired with a sensor belt, the app also has a mapping feature that could give remote monitors a soldier’s location and body position if he were to get wounded in the field. Those two capabilities set it apart from other health monitoring used in the military setting, Hoggle said.
Another application for the platform is in emergency response. The app would enable responders to assign bar codes to victims at the site of a disaster and attend to those who need immediate care. A separate Adhere 2 Care service could also identify all vehicles and devices able to be deployed to the disaster site at a given time.
Additional applications include the hospital setting, where Hoggle said the company will begin its first run in May, and consumer health monitoring.
Juniper Research estimates that 142 million health-related apps will be downloaded in the year 2016, and 3 million of them will be patients using mobile phones to have their health conditions monitored remotely.
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“There is a lot of competition, but we can actually deploy this technology right now,” Hoggle said. “There’s been a lot of talk about mobile health, but people have said our application is the first one they’ve ever seen that covers monitoring from A to Z.”
Customers of Adhere 2 Care will purchase license agreements and pay monthly or quarterly fees per user of the technology, Hoggle said.
Hoggle said he has been working on the design for the technology since 2009 and formed the company in 2011 in Douglasville, Georgia to commercialize it.
[photo by Flickr user Army Medicine]
