A new AI-powered app for long COVID will soon be available to consumers and complemented by a dashboard for providers.
The app, MyAdvocate, was developed by RAIsonance, a startup focused on AI and machine learning that was founded in response to the pandemic. The app and the technology behind it is said to be the first of its kind. Users cough into a mobile device, and the app analyzes their cough to provide a unique respiratory wellness score. Using that score, the app then tracks users' progress over time. It also offers a symptom diary to help users track their condition and support recovery.
“We have so much we have to learn as a society about this condition, what it means short-term and long-term,” Kitty Kolding, RAIsonance’s co-founder and CEO, told Fierce Healthcare. “It's infuriating that we are not prioritizing this as we should. These people deserve our help and they deserve real science to support them.”
To complement the offering, RAIsonance is developing free dashboards for providers to get updates on patients who use the app.
“We’re really hoping to make it readily free to healthcare providers; we want them to be very motivated and engaged in this,” Kolding said.
Payers and employers who want to offer the app as part of their wellness programs will also have access to custom packages based on the size and specifics of their requirements.
The respiratory wellness scores leverage proprietary technology developed by the startup known as Forced Cough Vocalization (FCV). Cough data hold an enormous amount of promise and are not really being leveraged by tech, Kolding explained. While pulmonary function tests are available, they don’t take into account the thousands of variables that might change over time like AI can. Users don’t need to have a cough as a symptom for the FCV functionality to detect progress on long-COVID.
Patients will be able to share their data directly and physicians will get alerts, for instance, when a patient’s FCV status drops. Fees will apply for customizing the dashboards.
“What we want to be able to provide these folks with is a combined set of data that they can present to their doctors and most importantly that they can understand themselves,” Kolding said.
Users’ data will be protected, with no intent to trade, sell or rent the information. There are also no ads on the platform. Users can authorize the app to release their data to a provider as needed.
Given how complex the technology is behind MyAdvocate, the app will cost between $10 and $14 per month, depending on the package. “We don’t see this as sort of a simplistic wellness kind of tool,” Kolding noted. The app itself will be free to download on the App Store and Google Play. The company is currently seeking testers to use the app and provide feedback for its final beta testing phase.
RAIsonance is also developing diagnostic tools for COVID-19 and tuberculosis, which have been in clinical trials and await approval from the Food and Drug Administration. “It’s unbelievably scalable,” Kolding said, with each tool able to process 20,000 tests per second. The tests are noninvasive, eco-friendly and will never expire or go out of stock. A digital diagnostic tool would also enable rapid data sharing with public health officials, Kolding argues. “It’s a really useful, distributed, easy-to-scale up solution,” Kolding said.