Dozee: Powering Remote Health Monitoring

By Ikyatha Yerasala

Dozee, India’s first contactless Remote Health Monitoring device uses a contactless sensor placed under the mattress to capture a patient’s vitals.

When the second wave of the pandemic hit India, the ordeal of looking for ICU beds and actually finding one, was an excruciating task for patients and their families. To solve the acute shortage of ICU beds, Dozee, a Bengaluru-based startup’s Remote Patient Monitoring technology was used to create step down ICUs. Their technology, which uses a contactless sensor, placed under the mattress, captures real-time body vitals without using any external wires or touching the user’s body. They also launched the Million ICU initiative to bring about a long-term transformation in India’s public healthcare infrastructure. Dozee’s one-of-a-kind technology has made the lives of healthcare professionals easier even before the COVID era.

An idea that was turned into reality by health-tech entrepreneur Mudit Dantwate and Gaurav Parchani, Dozee was created to simplify and transform healthcare in India. Mudit Dandwate, CEO & Co-founder, Dozee, reveals, “We wanted to create a technology that could be used by people across age groups, with varying degrees of technical expertise and healthcare know-how. And thus, we zeroed in on a health tracker that could continuously monitor a person’s health during sleep. Healthcare, in its existing state, was very complex. We saw an opportunity to make it simple, to make healthcare more accessible. Currently in India, only 1 lakh beds are being continuously monitored and there are about 19 lakh beds which are dependent on human intervention. We hope to bridge this gap in the coming years.” Dozee’s current product has come into place after 4 years of extensive R&D.

Mudit Dantwate and Gaurav Parchani, Dozee

The RPM technology

Their Remote Patient Monitoring works on a technology called Ballistocardiography (BCG), a non-invasive method that tracks vibrations from every heartbeat, respiration and smallest of body movements. The contactless sensor, placed under the mattress, captures real-time body vitals without using any external wires or touching the user’s body. Designed and manufactured in India, Dozee tracks key vitals of the human body such as Heart Rate, Respiration Rate, Oxygen Saturation, Sleep Stages, Stress-Recovery and more with a medical-grade 98.4% accuracy.

 “We have built a proprietary Advanced Health Intelligence System that extracts biomarkers and vital parameters from the noisy vibration data captured by the sensors. The AI system helps in identifying health deterioration through abnormalities across all vital parameters. In many cases, it has successfully predicted early health deterioration in conditions ranging from fever to heart failure, even before the patient could see the symptoms,” shares Dantwate.

The sensor captures micro-vibrations produced by the body every time the heart pumps blood, during inhalation, exhalation, muscle twitches, tremors and body movements. An AI-powered, Early Warning System then converts these signals into biomarkers and uses the data to present an analysis of the patient's health through a smartphone app, for retail users.

Dozee Pro

During the pandemic, Dozee’s RPM was able to covert beds to step-down ICUs which was the need of the hour considering the immense shortage of ICU facilities, especially during the second wave. “The step-down ICUs keep track of vital parameters of the patient and due to its no-contact working, the problem of healthcare professionals being infected by patients, can be mitigated using remote monitoring,” says Dantwate.

Dozee Pro enables continuous (more than 100 times per hour) and accurate monitoring of a patient’s heart rate, respiratory rate, and other clinical parameters like sleep apnea, myocardial performance metrics without contact with the patient.

The technology’s extensible platform integrates with other devices such as SPO2 sensor, ECG and temperature sensor to provide the entire suite of vitals parameters including oxygen saturation, body temperature and ECG. The device captures 250 data samples per second and gives a reading every 30 seconds. “This helps with early detection of patient deterioration and notifies the care team of any abnormalities before it becomes critical. Doctors can remotely monitor patients’ health from the centralised patient monitor, where at a time, hundreds can be monitored from the web-dashboard and also from a mobile phone app. Custom alerts can be put on every patient, helping doctors optimise treatment plans,” adds Dantwade.

Having partnered with 213 hospitals and having helped healthcare professionals and clinicians in timely identification of at-risk patients, Dozee is helping them cover more patients. It’s also helping doctors collect accurate clinical data of COVID-19 patients that will help researchers better understand effects of this virus.

Million ICU initiative

Not only did Dozee’s technology help several state Governments by turning beds into stepped-down and makeshift ICU beds, they also launched the MillionICU initiative to solve the ICU shortage crisis here. “We recently partnered with MP Tejasvi Surya to upgrade normal beds to step-down ICUs in Garden City Government hospital and KSRTC COVID centre. We helped set up a 24x7 Central Monitoring Cell at these hospitals which enables monitoring of multiple patients remotely who were previously monitored manually only every couple of hours. “Both teams have plans to provide Dozee devices along with oxygen concentrators from the MP’s office to people who are recovering at home. Government hospitals like LNH Hospital in Delhi, Charaka Hospital, Victoria Hospital, Anekal Government Hospital, ESIC in Bengaluru and Shimoga Institute of Medical Sciences have upgraded their hospital beds into step-down ICUs in the last few months. Collectively, 500+ Step-Down ICU beds have already been installed to create smart wards in two weeks. This initiative will ensure ICU-level care to more than 4800 patients,” reveals Dantwate.

The program aims to dramatically increase the number of HDUs with centralized patient monitoring in public hospitals and make critical care more easily available to needy, even in the remotest areas. Interestingly, Dozee saves around 30 minutes of nursing time per patient per day.

Collaborations

Their collaborations include two intriguing projects with NIMHANS, one of them being Parkinson's Management by detecting key information on body movements, tremors and vitals for remote consumption by clinicians to enable personalised modifications in treatment. “This project is partly funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through GCE India. We’re also working with the Tamil Nadu Government and ACT Grant in monitoring COVID patients in 5 hospital across 3 districts— Chengalpattu Medical College, Thiruvallur Medical College, Kilpauk Medical College (Chennai), Stanley Medical College and ESI Hospital. We’re also working with the Ministry of Ayush on monitoring rehabilitation of COVID patients through various therapeutic techniques at Rajiv Gandhi Superspeciality Hospital, Delhi.”

As for their future plans, the team will continue working on their AI so that it becomes even more efficient in decoding health data and identifying illnesses faster. “We’re expanding to accurately predict specific disorders, especially in neurology, pulmonology and cardiology. We’ve also partnered with over 30 hospitals and planning to scale across the country. We’re targeting Tier II cities too as the doctor to patient ratio is extremely skewered here. We have tied up with Indira Gandhi Government Medical College and Hospital and Government Medical College in Nagpur where 250 of our devices have been deployed. We hope to partner with more institutions in smaller cities,” shares Dantwade.

With this unique RPM technology solving many vital crises in healthcare, especially during COVID, this AI system holds a lot of promise when it comes to transforming India’s healthcare. Dozee costs Rs 11,999 and can also be rented at 3990/month.