The US Military’s Latest Wearables Can Detect Illness Two Days Before You Get Sick – By Patrick Tucker (Defense One) / Sept 22 2020
Some 400 troops are testing the devices, trained on nearly a quarter million cases to detect COVID and a whole lot more.
Some troops in the U.S. military are wearing a watch and ring kit that can alert them and their command if they’re going to get sick in the next day or two. It’s part of a new system that the Defense Innovation Unit, or DIU, has built with Philips Healthcare and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, or DTRA.
The watch and ring — by Garmin and Oura, respectively — are commercially available; they detect subtle biometric indicators, like slight changes in skin temperature. But a new algorithm, trained on Philips’ massive cache of patient bedside data, can analyze the data and predict whether the wearer will soon become ill from any of a wide variety of diseases, including COVID-19.
Called Rapid Analysis of Threat Exposure, or RATE, the system can’t tell you exactly what you have, but can tell you the likelihood, on a scale of 1 to 100, that a sick day is ahead.
“Originally, this wasn’t designed for COVID-19, but the algorithm was trained against some SARS variants, of which COVID-19 is one,” said Dr. Christian Whitchurch, who runs the human systems portfolio at DIU. “We trained this algorithm on something like a quarter-million patient records. These are folks that went into the hospital for an elective surgery…and then became unwell.
Continue to article: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2020/09/militarys-latest-wearables-can-detect-illness-two-days-you-get-sick/168664/
