NY-NJ Hospitals to Use Smart Clothes in COVID-19 Telehealth Program

Several hospitals in New Jersey and New York will be using smart clothing in a telehealth program aimed at providing remote care for patients infected with or suspected of having the coronavirus.

The Hackensack Meridian Health Systems, a 17-hospital system based in Edison, NJ, and Brooklyn-based Maimonides Medical Center are partnering with Nanowear on the remote patient monitoring program, which will use sensor-embedded undergarments to track physiological and biomarker data in patients at the health systems.

The project is the latest in a string of RPM programs recently launched to track and manage COVID-19 cases, both in-patient and at home. Some are using mHealth wearables, while others use telemedicine platforms that either gather data or allow the patient to enter data. The technology allows caregivers to monitor multiple patients from other location, reducing the risk of infection.

"The COVID-19 paradigm shift has accelerated healthcare systems' need to implement staff-contactless monitoring involving acute and chronic disease-related hospitalizations," John Marshall, MD, head of the Emergency Department at Maimonides Medical Center, said in a press release.

The hospitals will be using “cloth-nanotechnology sensors” to track a variety of cardiac, pulmonary and circulatory biomarkers, which are relayed through an mHealth app to a physician portal. While the technology can be used to monitor a wide range of chronic health conditions, it’s being applied here to track changes caused by COVID-19.

“What we need to understand about COVID-19 is why certain patients develop a cytokine mediated immune response from the virus," Sameer Jamal, MD, of Hackensack Meridian Health, the program’s principal investigator, said in the press release. "This resulting inflammation within the circulatory system often leads to severe complications or death, which we have seen first-hand in New York City and the surrounding area. Diagnosis and co-morbidities alone is not enough to determine risk to admitted patients before they need to be transferred to ICU.”

Smart clothing represents, in a way, the next generation of RPM, incorporating mHealth sensors into clothing and wearables that stress comfort and ease of use. While earlier iterations of the technology have been applied primarily to sports and health and wellness uses, providers and connected health companies are now looking at applying the concept to care management.

“When we talk about telemedicine, we often talk about video conferencing,” Venk Varadan, co-founder and CEO of New York-based Nanowear, which is seeking FDA approval for its technology platform, said in the release. “But to truly enable remote diagnostics we must incorporate clinical-grade remote monitoring that is affordable, comfortable, and simple for patients to use.”