Mobile App Uses Your Face To Record Digital Biomarkers of Lung Disease

As a company we are focused on digital health, utilizing mobile device sensors that enable us to create highly scalable solutions so that we can put these into the hands of hundreds of millions of people at very low cost.

We are laser-focused on diseases of the heart and the lungs with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases being some of the leading causes of death globally. I think it's important for us to understand how our heart and lungs function over time, and not just at points in time when we end up visiting the physician because we think there's an issue. By capturing longitudinal information, we can create trajectories to predict where our health is headed.

If you think about the heart and the lungs, the simplest thing we can measure is heart rate. How your heart rate changes over time, for example during exercise, and how quickly it returns to baselines – these measurements are all biomarkers of health. Other, more sophisticated measures also exist, such as the current wearable devices used for glucose monitoring.

At electronRx, we focus on cardiovascular and respiratory systems, and we're taking digital biomarker measurements to an extremely detailed level, whereby we are using technologies that give you real physiological measures of your heart and lung health through cardiac and pulmonary function.

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Disease Biomarker Discovery

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The markers our technology measures can provide insights into a patient's health. By looking at the changes that are occurring to these biomarkers it is possible to determine if an individual is at risk of a certain disease or condition and if so if there are things you should move away from or do more of to prevent the disease or condition from developing or worsening.

We are looking at software as a medical device – with all the regulatory burden that goes with it – and linking this back to chronic diseases. We are focused on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), interstitial lung disease and asthma. All these diseases have a massive impact on the way you breathe.

Our technology allows us to capture how a person's breathing changes as seamlessly as possible with the least amount of harassment of the patient. These objective measures are then linked back to subjective measures that the patient-reported symptoms give you. Therefore, our technology gives an absolute understanding to the physicians who interpret what is exactly happening with the patient. This allows physicians to make treatment decisions based on data collected over a long period and not just based on what is said during a five-minute consultation.

Here is a means by which to empower the patient to tell their story to the physician, who can then better understand the trajectory of their health.

For example, patients with COPD can have serious flare-ups and become hospitalized. In serious cases, these flare-ups can lead to death. By predicting these flare-ups before they occur it may be possible to take evasive actions. For most diseases, certain symptoms begin to occur maybe 48 hours before and sometimes even 72 hours before. If we can get an objective measure of these symptoms, which is what our technology is doing, we can predict the risk of a disease flare-up, and therefore we can put an intervention in place.

In the UK there is an estimated 1.2 million people affected by COPD. In some parts of the world, it is estimated that a much higher percentage of the population is suffering but only a small proportion of these people are diagnosed. For example, in Japan, the prevalence of COPD is approximately 10% among subjects aged ≥40 years, with more than 80% of COPD patients being underdiagnosed. Our technology can help patients and physicians effectively manage COPD and make informed interventions. I hope that, in the long-term, our technology will improve patient outcomes for this disease.

We can also use our technology to identify patients who have rare diseases, for example, PAH, or interstitial lung disease. These patients are often misdiagnosed because they all report the same type of symptoms. In PAH, for example, there's an estimated delay of two to three years before you get diagnosed. We are constructing a solution that we can distribute to everyone who owns a mobile phone. At the touch of a button, we can essentially deposit a medical device onto your phone, which then enables you to track, monitor, manage and share health information with a physician of your choice. The physician can then act on this information accordingly to suggest appropriate treatments or lifestyle changes.

We have an opportunity to help several million people on the planet. That's where we're going. Now, the question is, will we get there?

It's the usual entrepreneurial story. We have the vision, and we have the passion but limited resources.

The technology is working. We have patients, we have corporate partners and we are on an upward trajectory. I was talking to a patient today who was diagnosed with a rare chronic disease at the age of 3 or 4 and she's 30-years-old now. It’s these patients that we can help by potentially preventing suffering through early diagnosis at very little cost.