• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 5, 2020

Brainworks today will launch an AI-powered application accessible from desktop and mobile devices that allows people to manage their personal health data and track COVID-19-specific symptoms.

The application, Medio Smart Health, supports ambient biometrics, including heart rate, respiration rate, and changes in skin tone related to blood oxygenation. These vitals are automatically measured by the cameras in any smartphone, tablet or PC.

The camera analyzes the tiny changes of color in the person’s face, tiny bobs of the head and flairs of the nostrils. It also can estimate the oxygen in the blood. Through a series of questions and images taken by the camera, the application enables users to track changes to their health and determine whether they should seek additional testing, medical care, or hospitalization.

Ask inventor Phillip Alvelda, CEO of Brainworks and former DARPA and NASA lead, what it’s like to have a mind like his, and he will tell you that “sometimes it’s lonely because at times you see things before others do like the progression of disease such as coronavirus.”

Alvelda envisions that affiliate links would help keep the application free. Brands would serve up as an affiliate link if the application detects the person needs to be tested, for example. In that case it might provide a list of nearby testing facilities as a sponsored link.

At DARPA, Alvelda invested “hundreds of millions of dollars into new technology that would allow electronics and protonics to interface directly with the human cortex to cure things like blindness.”

The health assessment tracker does not diagnose, but enables millions of critical healthcare, first responders, food-chain, and other essential workers, as well as the general public to test themselves as often as they like. 

Alvelda began putting together the company in 2017, spending the first year putting the company together and charting out its direction. The company incorporated in August 2018 and immediately got into clinical trials to design the first services.

“The first disruption came when COVID hit and we found ourselves developing these systems for hospitals,” he said. “We realized the bigger need was take what we had and make something for c consumers, so they didn’t need to go into the hospital.”

Keeping the data private is built into the architecture of the application. Data is stored without identifying the person. While the camera identifies vital signs, it makes all the calculations on the phone. Then it sends the data to be stored as a medical record in a cloud. Alvelda insists nothing is linked to the person’s identity. He said a hacker might find heart and breathe rates, but not tied to anyone individual.

From the aggregated data, the application can identify trends in a specific geographic area and predict where COVID’s growing, places that are not as obvious.

In the future, Alvelda said, the hope is that the application will have the ability to identify a person's symptoms such as a heart attack before the person has one.

For the COVID screening, the application requires the user to answer questions. Then it logs the vital signs. The user has the ability to download the results.