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Dear PhysioQ community,
what a whirlwind 2020 has been so far. With the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic, as a team, we wanted to contribute by doing whatever we could to help. In talking with many PhysioQ community friends and advisors in the healthcare sector, many of whom were risking their lives fighting on the front lines, we realized that we were in a unique position to offer help and assistance to all those impacted.
In early 2020, we decided to redirect our limited resources, postpone the launch of LabFront from Q1 to Q4 2020, and focus our attention on helping fight COVID-19. We’ve provided below an update regarding the activities we’ve been undertaking over the first half of 2020, as well as what lies ahead for the rest of 2020.
We sincerely thank the entire PhysioQ community and our partners for all the amazing support and coming together so quickly to help fight COVID-19. We hope we can build on our momentum and continue creating a global impact as we enter the second half of 2020.
- the PhysioQ Team
Why we launched NEOMillions of people across the world are currently being asked to socially distance and monitor their health from home, yet do not have access to affordable tools that can help them self-monitor for COVID-19 early warning signs. With 40% of COVID-19 transmissions occurring before someone feels sick, the problem is that many of its key biomarkers – such as blood oxygen levels– simply can’t be detected by an individual.
Our SolutionNEO is a free platform that allows families to proactively monitor key vital signs for COVID-19 together using affordable wearable devices (ie. Garmin, Beurer, etc). In providing people with the ability to have selected friends and family monitor their health status, we can help provide peace of mind to families who are feeling anxious, and worried about the health of their loved ones. Through our AI anomaly detection system, NEO can help early-detect COVID-19 symptoms that simply can’t be detected by an individual, alert you, and allow you to share your health data with clinicians if needed.
Open COVID-19 DatabankIn tandem, PhysioQ has also launched one of the world’s largest open COVID-19 Databanks, freely open to all health researchers to accelerate research into COVID-19. Everyone using NEO will have the option to donate their anonymized data to the Databank, providing researchers with access to thousands of research-quality, real-world datasets. A major problem in COVID-19 research is that data on COVID-19 cases outside of the hospital is generally lacking - not only in times prior to hospitalization and after discharge, but also for individuals who never presented to the hospital/clinic in the first place due to very mild-to-moderate symptoms. Over 1000 researchers from across the world, from Harvard to Oxford, have already committed to joining the efforts in analyzing this data.
In June 2020, NEO won the Techstars Global COVID-19 Competition (from over 70 countries, 16,000 entries).
These include Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, USA, Vietnam, etc.
NEO helping small businesses empower their employees with COVID-19 monitoring tools (launched August 2020 in North America)In order for businesses to reopen and stay open in the COVID-19 era, they need to ensure they protect their employees and customers. NEO helps small businesses empower their employees with the tools to monitor for COVID-19 symptoms.
NEO helping school communities safely re-open (launched August 2020 in North America)
As part of our COVID-19 response, we are expanding our service to school communities to help ensure a safer and healthier environment for staff, students and their respective family members.
We are partnering with CustomEd to launch a pilot online competition for students aged 13-18. This 2-week online competition will involve teams of students identifying a problem within their community and launching a mini exploratory research project using Garmin wearable devices alongside PhysioQ’s LabFront platform. They will go through the entire process from selecting a topic, hypothesis and protocol design, to data collection, to data analysis, and presenting their project in a 6min pitch to our judging panel.
All teams will be assigned team mentors (experts from Harvard, UC Berkeley, etc) who will help advise the teams along the way, along with access to various resources (ie. online video lessons on performing data analysis, how to pitch, etc) and PhysioQ research experts.
We are creating PhysioQ STEM education programs for schools (Gr 9-12) that will promote inquiry-based learning and allow students to experience a more hands-on approach to learning science.
Schools will be able to incorporate our program into their science curriculum or after-school programs, whether in-school or via remote learning, and be able to launch anything from small-scale projects for a handful of students, to school-wide projects/competitions at the community or global level.
Our all-inclusive STEM package for schools (Gr 9-12) will include LabFront accounts + teacher and student companion resources (Worksheets, PPT, lesson plans, online video lessons, etc) + PhysioQ-compatible wearables + mentorship opportunities (optional).
Students will experience the entire research process from selecting a topic, hypothesis and protocol design, to data collection, to data analysis, and presenting their project.
In case you’re not familiar with LabFront, it is a software platform that simplifies the data collection and management process for both researchers and participants. It allows researchers to collect real-world research-quality data using wearable devices, create customized tasks for their participants through our participant-facing PhysioQ App, and track real-time participant engagement. https://physioq.org/labfront
PhysioQ is a nonprofit organization that believes the pursuit of knowledge and advancement of scientific research--as well as the engagement of citizens in the scientific process--is the path to a better society. PhysioQ creates affordable and easy-to-learn research tools, allowing anyone, from academic researchers to everyday citizens, to conduct health research and further their passion for health science.