NIH moves forward with physIQ's COVID digital biomarkers

Originally published in MobiHealthNews

physIQ announced this week that the National Institutes of Health have agreed to enter the second phase of ongoing project to develop digital biomarkers of COVID-19. The contract was initially announced back in September, and with this week's decision brings its total value to $6.6 million.

The project seeks to build an early warning system able to anticipate rapid decline in COVID-19 patients' conditions by using AI and continuous multi-parameter vital signs (as opposed to point measurements, such as temperature or Sp02 alone). The company said that it had enrolled and was monitoring 400 patients in the first phase of the study, and it anticipates that the second phase will start later this month and enroll 1,200 patients to validate the novel digital biomarkers.

“Using Phase I data, we developed and tested a preliminary digital biomarker using state of the art machine learning algorithms that take advantage of our extensive library of wearable biosensor analytics as inputs,” Stephan Wegerich, physIQ’s chief science officer, said in a statement. “Furthermore, we were able to demonstrate performance levels that far exceeded our target performance criterion.  We are looking forward to further validation in Phase II.”