Harvard’s Wyss Inst. spins out bedside data collection biz MediCollector

Harvard’s Wyss Institute said yesterday its bedside data-acquistion software will be commercialized by new startup MediCollector.

Developed as part of the Institute’s infant apnea prevention program, the software continuously acquires vital signs, such as breathing activity, from affected premature newborns and analyzes the data with an algorithm to predict apneic episodes, the Wyss Institute said. The software connects to a therapeutic mattress that vibrates to restore normal breathing as soon as an episode is predicted.

“While we were developing and testing our apnea-prevention technology, it became increasingly clear that one of its components, the data-acquisition software, had great potential value for a broad range of applications in research and healthcare, and not just for newborns in the intensive care unit,” Wyss Institute lead senior staff engineer James Niemi said in a press release.

Medicollector developed the software further, turning it into an independent, portable application that communicates with various patient monitors and devices in hospitals and records the data directly to a user’s hard disk, the Wyss Institute said.

“In today’s hospitals, clinically-relevant measurements, such as heart rate and blood pressure, are usually only recorded at infrequent intervals.  Most of the vital data generated by medical devices at the bedside is therefore lost and never recorded,” Medicollector founder John Osborne said in prepared remarks.

NanoVation-GS, a spun out company from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, is using the software to validate nanomaterial-based respiration sensors on infants battling sleep apnea, the Institute said.

“The NanoVation-GS device platform provides miniaturized, inexpensive, and easy-to-use monitoring of various vital signs, including respiration rate, heart rate, temperature and oxygen saturation. MediCollector’s software is a valuable tool for continuous collection of vital signs in hospital wards and for enabling comparisons of our newly developed technology with the currently available vital signs techniques used in clinical practice,” NanoVation-GS chief technical officer Sagi Gliksman said in a press release.

The Wyss Institute said the software could potentially be used to reduce alarm fatigue by collecting and analyzing alarm counts and response time, as well.

“While the initial application of MediCollector’s software will be research-focused, down the road, the company will build a larger portfolio in which the software is integrated with clinical alarm systems,” Osborne said.

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