IAI, Microsoft, Soroka hospital develop COVID-19 monitoring ‘cockpit’
Using AI, the remote monitoring system collects patients’ data from devices and sensors, alerting medics on progress from afar
Shoshanna Solomon was The Times of Israel's Startups and Business reporter
Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Microsoft and the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba have joined forces in the battle against COVID-19 to develop a supervision system that makes it possible to collect real-time data on patients who are on ventilators and concentrate it in a single location to make it easier for medical teams to monitor them from afar.
Using artificial intelligence technologies, the system integrates the data from a variety of medical devices and sensors and analyzes it to gain insights, identify trends, and generate early warning signals to help medical teams better watch their patients, IAI and Soroka said in a joint statement.
The data collected is made available to medical staff in a control room, a kind of “cockpit” from which doctors can remotely hold their rounds and manage their patients, medical devices and intensive care unit, the statement said.
The data can also be shared with others, inside and outside of the hospital, while still being secured with medical data protection standards, the statement added.
The teams used Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform for their work, with the support of Microsoft in Israel. The platform enables real-time data ingestion and data analytics services as well as displaying patient data and video streaming services to visually monitor the patients.
The development makes it possible to supervise a large number of patients simultaneously, as “millions of events can be transferred and displayed in the system per second,” the statement said.
The advantage of the system that was developed “is its ability to simulate the routine situation in which I enter the room, see the patient, and collect data from all the devices around him,” said Prof. Yaniv Almog, Soroka’s head of the Internal Intensive Care Unit for COVID-19 Patients, in a statement. “I see benefits and the potential for widespread use of the system in the future as well. By means of its early warning capability and its ability to collect large amounts of patient data at early stages of the disease, we can produce a system that warns us of possible deterioration in a patient’s condition, so that we can respond earlier and possibly prevent it.”
The development is part of an initiative to leverage state-owned companies, in cooperation with Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure (MAFAT) and the State Companies Authority, to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
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