How Neteera Deployed its Proprietary AI on BioT’s Distributed Medical Device Platform to Improve Patient Care

Medical Tech innovators, Neteera Technology developed their flagship device ‘Neteera 130’ to provide enhanced remote monitoring of patient vital signs, to improve care, and ultimately reduce healthcare costs while enabling optimal comfort for the patients.

The Neteera 130 system (marketed as a ‘digital nursing assistant’) provides a continuous, contactless, passive vital signs and bio-data monitoring solution, eliminating the need for device manipulation, removal of clothing, and caregiver presence.

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Neteera’s solution is designed to require minimal clinician interaction, no patient interaction, as well as being non-invasive for patients. Leveraging proprietary AI algorithms to analyze data collected from high-frequency radar sensors distributed around the patient’s location, Neteera is able to alert caregivers if the patient’s condition changes.

Neteera’s algorithms find patterns that correlate to clinical events and apply that inference to other patients. This process enables Neteera to offer an adaptive and predictive solution providing clinicians with necessary data for accurately monitoring patient vital signs.  

This contactless device offers improved patient care with a reduction in effort required to maintain ongoing monitoring of vitals signs. This low-friction patient monitoring approach, removes the burden of checking patients’ vital signs from nurses, providing more time for follow-up, and responding to patient needs more efficiently.

The challenge

To capture the benefit of being first to market with this groundbreaking contactless solution, they needed to architect the solution so that initial development timelines were short and subsequent evolutions would also be short.  In addition, to keep the cost of the device low enough to be affordable and scale to home-use in the future, an architecture that allows for heavy-duty algorithms to be executed on the cloud, rather than on the device, was required. Choosing such “distributed medical device” architecture would also enable additional important benefits such as faster evolution of its raw data processing algorithm, as well as improved protection of privacy.

In order to bring their product to market, Neteera required a secure, compliant cloud solution that would accommodate large volumes of data, be able to run their proprietary algorithms, and accommodate changes to the system over time. 

Creating such infrastructure in-house posed a significant challenge, for several reasons: delay in time to market as a result of having to build the system from scratch; cybersecurity and privacy risks rising from “teething problems” of a newborn system; as a hardware and data science company Neteera didn’t have in-house skills in cloud or cybersecurity and would have needed to acquire new talent. 

Instead, Neteera looked for an existing platform to help them build a state of the art, fully fledged, connected care system in record-breaking time. They needed a platform meeting their requirements, which included: 

• Managing a large volume of data (‘big data’) applying analytics such as trend detection
• Maintaining strict control on PHI
• Ability to easily deploy proprietary algorithms that intervene in the data streaming pipeline, in a self-service way 
• Complying with all necessary regulations

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The solution

Neteera decided to leverage BioT’s unique no-code, self-service platform to build their distributed medical device. BioT is a self-service platform for building distributed medical devices  - i.e. a device that executes a major part of its functionality on the cloud.

BioT introduced to the regulated medical device space a unique ‘no-code’ approach, enabling the manufacturer to teach the BioT platform about its device and ecosystem data model in less than a day. This major breakthrough in technology enables medical devices to be based on a medical-grade compliant cloud in a fraction of the time it would take if done any other way. With BioT, in-house development efforts and associated costs are significantly reduced, as well as the ongoing costs of maintaining a medical-grade system in an ever-changing cyber threatened environment. Furthermore, no cloud backend development or DevOps expertise are required when building on BioT.

As well as reducing the burden on Neteera’s team in terms of development, by working with the BioT platform, the day to day maintenance of cybersecurity, regulatory compliance and cloud SaaS high availability took place without Neteera needing to take any action. BioT’s expert team is monitoring any change in the regulatory or cybersecurity landscape, and constantly evolving the BioT platform.“The capacity to run our detection algorithms on a secure platform was essential for our system,” says Shahar Yaron, VP Product of Neteera, “as was the ability to update those algorithms without requiring any further development investment.”

To deliver an ultimate cutting edge experience to its customers, BioT’s software leverages the AWS cloud. One cutting edge requirement that becomes more prevalent is to support real time biomarker streams and analytics. For that, BioT leverages AWS Timestream to manage high frequency time series data streams where AWS IoT Core MQTT broker is used for streaming the data packets from the device to BioT backend, as well as to the web portals.

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Results

BioT’s solution enabled the bringing together of all parameters of care – patient information, various clinical settings and patient needs. Real time alerts based on biomarkers are communicated directly to end users (either physicians or patients).

BioT enabled Neteera to accelerate their time to market by providing an out-of-the-box cloud solution that was made to match Neteera’s requirements in almost zero time. With the highest level regulatory compliance, medical-grade cybersecurity, ongoing device and cloud management, BioT removed much of the regulatory burden from the Neteera team.

The flexibility of the BioT platform, to allow for Neteera’s own proprietary code to be incorporated into BioT, enabled it to offer an adaptive system through the capacity to host continuously updating algorithms within the platform. In addition, BioT’s customizable user workflow allows Neteera to perfect their user experience.

“With BioT, Neteera helps to improve nurses' workflow efficiency by offering remote vital signs monitoring, data collection, and an alert mechanism to provide patients with a seamless experience,” says Yaron.

Moving forward: continued partnership

BioT has facilitated Neteera’s ability to provide a unique solution that uses real-time patient monitoring to adapt its outputs to the specific needs of each patient. Neteera already has a detailed product roadmap of new features to be added, including blood pressure, sleep apnea, fall risks, and bed exits. With the winning combination of their sensor hardware and the BioT platform, Neteera is moving forward in implementing the next phase of remote vital sign monitoring. Working in partnership with BioT, Neteera is confident that all their distributed medical device needs will be taken care of at every stage, without them needing to invest in any in-house infrastructure.