BARDA is collaborating with Aidar Health, Inc. to develop and validate the company’s Aidar COVID-19 decompensation index (AIDI), a new early warning system that uses MouthLab, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared device, to enable timely intervention in COVID-19 patients at risk for severe illness and rapid deterioration.
Integrated devices and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled technologies like AIDI have the potential to provide early and actionable health status information to empower individuals and health care providers.
Identifying early signs of COVID-19 disease progression or deterioration (such as difficulty breathing, chest pain, fainting and sudden dizziness or weakness) is crucial to ensuring successful patient outcomes. Delays in accurately detecting these warning signs may worsen prognosis and impact the quality of life of patients. While clinicians can evaluate hospitalized patients more closely, intervening early can be difficult when their patients are being clinically surveilled from home. Robust early warning tools such as MouthLab, when combined with data science, can effectively monitor a large number of individual subjects’ physiological parameters in real-time and detect early signs of deteriorations. This will enable the managing physicians to provide timely intervention and ultimately, help avoid an Emergency Department visit/hospitalization.