The University of British Columbia

Published purpose

Contactless technologies can complement and support clinical diagnosis and decision making during the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Patients can conveniently remain in a safe distance while frontline healthcare staff remotely monitor, assess and triage them. This can reduce the risk of infection transmission to healthcare staff as well as the need for unnecessary emergency department visits. Beyond COVID-19 pandemic, contactless technologies are required as Canadians age and become more likely to need access to healthcare, a low cost, efficient and convenient method of continuously monitoring these physiological parameters, applicable to both in-hospital and at-home settings. The proposed project is conceptualized as a collaboration with NRC in Digitally-Augmented Contactless Diagnostics. The present system permits the acquisition and extraction of physiological signals such as for example, blood volume pulse (BVP)) from patients using contactless methods, as well as methodologies, that determine various physiological parameters including, but not limited to, heart rate, oxygen saturation (SpO2), respiration rate, and temperature. The Digital Emergency Medicine (DigEM) team at UBC, led by Dr Kendall Ho, will provide clinical input into the applications of the Contactless Sensing System in several perspectives including clinical assessment and analysis, system validation, usability and feasibility testing.