GoGuardian launches suicide prevention tool, Fitbit reveals trends for heart rate data collection, and more digital health news briefs

By Laura Lovett
03:34 pm
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Technology looks after students. Yesterday education-focused software company GoGuardian launched a suicide prevention tool for students in grades K-12. The system, called Beacon, include an early-warning system that helps schools identify pupils at risk of self harm or suicide. The system employs machine learning to access web searchers, social media behaivor, chats, forums, and emails. 

“Our mission is to put student potential and wellbeing at the center of all of our technology. With advanced machine learning, we have supported K-12 students in every aspect of their education, and now we are extending these capabilities to help support students’ mental health and safety,” Advait Shinde, cofounder and CEO of GoGuardian, said in a statement. “In working with 10,000 schools with more than 5.3 million students, we learned how pervasive suicide and self-harm issues are affecting today’s youth, so we invested considerable time and resources to develop a dedicated product built specifically for school mental health professionals to get them the help they need.”

Show me the money. When it comes to investing in new healthcare technologies, it's no secret AI is one of the top dogs. In fact, Tractica, a research group, recent reported that the healthcare AI software, hardware, and service market would surpass $34 billion by 2025. Tractica predicts the top use cases for the technology will be medical image analysis, healthcare virtual digital assistants, and computational drug discovery and effectiveness analysis.

A slow heart is a healthy heart. Fitbit has logged 150 billion hours users' heart rate data, making it the largest dataset of its kind ever collected, Yahoo Finance reports. The wearable giant has also kept tabs on its users ages, sex, location, and weight, but all of the data is anonymized. Fitbit gave Yahoo a rundown of the heart rate data and what it means to the average user — for instance, a lower resting heart rate is linked to overall better health, while a higher resting heart rate means an increased likelihood of death.  

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Fluid checker. This morning, early intravenous infiltration and extravasation wearable ivWatch announced that it landed a CE mark for its newest product, the ivWatch Model 400. 

“Peripheral IV therapy is among the most common invasive hospital procedures performed worldwide. Having the ability to extend the only surveillance monitoring technology for early detection of these common IV complications to new markets will help improve patient safety and effectiveness of IV therapy on a much larger scale,” Gary Warren, president and CEO of ivWatch, said in a statement. “Navigating the comprehensive process to secure these regulatory milestones not only makes ivWatch positioned for growth but gives us the ability to respond quickly to new opportunities.”

The watch continuously monitors the IV site, which can help early detection of adverse events. 

Tooth checker. Dental app Toothpic, an on-demand dental advice platform, launched today. The app lets users take photos of their teeth with their smartphone camera. These photos are then sent to a remote dentist for evaluation. The platform promises to have the evaluation back to the user within 24 hours, and also links the patient to a dentist in their area. 

“People don’t care about their dental health until something goes wrong,” Mark Moore, founder and CEO of Toothpic, said in a statement. “More than half of Americans haven’t been to the dentist in the last year. It’s frustrating too, because for the most part, dental pain is completely preventable. We want to provide people with a simple way to stay on top of their oral health. Toothpic is a secure solution for people to get instant access to independent advice without the pain, inconvenience, and time of visiting or searching for a dentist.”

Put it on the calendar. Medical scheduling platform QueueDr announced that it will be joining the Epic App Orchard, a developer program and marketplace. This will make it easier for the system to integrate with providers' Epic software. According to a statement, QueueDr will be able to use the system’s API to schedule appointments, send reminders, and reschedule visits without Epic customers having to leave the Epic interface. 

"We are thrilled to be part of the App Orchard. In order to improve patient access, we must make life easier for the staff serving them,” Patrick Randolph, founder and CEO of QueueDr, said in a statement. “That is why we made QueueDr fully autonomous for all Epic customers, something we couldn't have done without the App Orchard program."

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