HsPro
Holistic Sensing – Professional Version
Athena GTX, Inc., through an ongoing MTEC award, is working with the US Navy Advanced Medical Development team to finish development and field a mature wearable sensor suite and algorithm technology that will detect, predict, and warn of decreased cognitive function before a physiologic episode in flight occurs. The current effort is to upgrade and demonstrate the current functional prototype hardware and software developed under the initial USN HMAPS program and is particularly directed at reducing technology risk, engineering, and life-cycle cost risk and to determine the appropriate set of technologies to be integrated into the full system.
Physiologic episodes have been documented in fixed wing tactical aircraft and highlight the need for a physiologic status monitor that includes: a platform independent person-mounted monitoring / warning system that accounts for individual physiologic tolerance; correlates physiologic decrements to cognitive deficit, operator fatigue and workload, provides timely detection and prediction of deficits to present a reliable alert before crisis exists; integrates with existing equipment / clothing. Environmental stressors and physiologic factors impact the cardiovascular, pulmonary and cerebrovascular systems and cause impaired psychomotor and cognitive function. Tolerance to the stressors varies not only from person to person, but changes for individuals based on health and fitness levels. While commercial personal health monitoring systems have been developed for clinical and sports applications, none are directly applicable to the aviation environment, have the level of sensing embedded into the smart HsPro®, or have the underlying dynamic predictive and trending algorithms that adapts to individual differences and accounts for routine exposures to rapidly changing environmental stresses that result in reduced oxygen supplies to brain and other tissues.
Athena has also spun off a commercial variant for first responders under HsPro. The objective of the program is to develop and mature a commercial wearable sensor suite and extensively leverage the ongoing US Navy platform with new algorithm technology that will detect, predict, and warn of decreased operator function before an injury or incident occurs. While commercial personal health monitoring systems have been developed for clinical and sports applications, none are directly applicable to the First Responder environments, have the level of sensing embedded into HsPro, the robust connectivity, or have the underlying dynamic predictive algorithms that adapts to individual differences and accounts for routine exposures to rapidly changing environmental stresses that result in compromised performance. This product is soon available as a wearable sensing and state assessment platform worn discretely under uniforms and gear. Currently the wearables industry is hot but capability is limited without significantly burdening the user. HsPro addresses the wearable market explosion, as wearables are the new tech buzzword.
This need is clearly astounding and was not truly anticipated a decade ago. What has fueled this market is miniaturization of electronics and the explosion of a more connected world. According to “Wearable Technology Market (Consumer Electronics, Healthcare, Enterprise & Industrial, and Others), the overall market for wearable technology and health apps was expected to reach $31.27 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 17.8% between 2015 and 2020. Growth here is double or triple other market segments. Although we do not plan to compete in the market with Fit-Bit technology “knock-offs”, we are developing a wearable with higher-end product that touch markets more tied to emergency medical data response rather than simply physiological or health status.
In terms of cost and years of potential lives lost, traumatic injury arguably remains the most important public health problem facing the United States (H. Bonatti and J. F. Calland, in Trauma. 2008 Aug; Emerg Med Clin North Am, 26(3):625-48). This is a fifteen year-old article but things have arguably not changed. As cause of injury being an “accident”, especially involving falls is still dominating the non-fatal statistics. Leading causes of death track well in the under 45 year olds, but diseases predominate in the over 45 year old demographics. Athena GTX, Inc. is critically focused on traumatic injury care, especially as related to “prehospital” trauma care or point of injury (POI). This includes but is not limited by remote medicine, wireless connectivity, miniaturization, and creating custom highly mobile App’s or custom data applications that allow care providers to connect to and acquire rapid medical state data on their patients as quickly as possible out at the POI. Four clear markets emerge for what we do: telehealth (out of office care connecting subject matter experts to the remote patient), highly mobile and/or wearable technologies (ability to easily transport or carry care devices to the patient), smart devices (in the sense of doing more with what data we can acquire, and mass casualty (handling many injuries simultaneously, typically in a prehospital application). We will continue to explore what this means to our marketing strategy moving forward and focus on game-changing technology developments like Hspro®.
In parallel, we see global markets for progressive age-related diseases such as COPD and CHF, obesity related issues such as CKD, hypertension, organ failures and diabetes exacerbate the need for earlier awareness of physiological state and state changes even before the need for medical care in a growing number of patients not critically injured. These still dominate the causes of death through 2020, although we are now seeing “Covid 19” COD showing up in CDC statistics. According to the CDC cardiopulmonary diseases and various organ failures and neoplastic cancers still outpace all other sources of death in older people. Progression to disease tracking via home care is our future add on for HsPro.