Take A Selfie, Get Your Health Data

Who needs health-monitoring wearables?

I just took a 30-second video selfie of my face,  and a few seconds later, received a report on my heart rate, breathing rate, mental stress index, facial skin age, body shape index, and more.

The health industry calls this “video-based contactless health monitoring." And this morning, as announced at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas, NuraLogix became the first provider of such monitoring to add blood pressure measurement and type 2 diabetes assessment to its list of capabilities.

NuraLogix markets its platform, called Anura, to other businesses on a branded or white label basis. It can now measure more than 30 health parameters.

"The ability to assess health with just a look into everyday, readily available consumer devices is a game changer for the healthcare industry,” said NuraLogix’ chief medical officer Dr. Keith Thompson, in a press statement. “Using ubiquitous devices, Anura has the potential to accelerate the adoption of solutions for the early detection of chronic diseases, expand health equity and access to underserved populations while dramatically decreasing costs of care."

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Anura works by extracting facial blood flow information from the user’s video, combining it with artificial intelligence analysis in the cloud to extrapolate health information from the pattern of blood flows, and sending the results back to the app. 

Anura’s 100+ customers so far cover a range of industries and countries.

One U.S. customer, announced at AutoTech Detroit in June, is Health in Transportation, which provides health and wellness services to truckers and mass transit drivers.

In the U.S., though, Anura is currently “for investigational use only,” meaning that it has yet to get regulatory approval.

The same goes for the mobile app, also intended for a B2B audience, but accessible by consumers like me in the iOS App Store and Android’s Google Play. This app is dubbed Anura Lite and is “purely for demonstration purposes to show users what our product does at a very basic level,” the company told Marketing Daily.

Anura cautions that the app is “not a substitute for the clinical judgment of a health care professional” and only “intended to improve your awareness of general wellness.”

Since the results I received seemed to reflect those of a recent in-person physical, I expect to keep using Anura as a guide to when I may want to again visit the doctor -- especially because you can plot your history to see anything trending in the wrong direction.

And I’m looking forward to continued breakthroughs in the health monitoring arena.

For example, it isn’t just video selfies that can provide non-wearable health analytics through AI, by the way.

A recent study by University of Washington and University of California San Diego researchers found that blood oxidation levels can be measured just by placing a finger over a smartphone’s camera and flash, rather then an in-person visit where the doctor or nurse places a clip over your fingertip or ear.

Other items in NuraLogix’s future sights to provide more health monitoring include bathroom mirrors and  TV screens, the company said, “transforming the way chronic diseases are identified, managed, and prevented.”

And that HLTH conference? It’s the  fifth year of an event said to “convene the entire healthcare ecosystem,” where many new product announcements will be made.

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