Xerox working with Bengaluru Hospitals to facilitate easy health monitoring

BENGALURU: Monitoring your health vitals could be just a click away. IT firm Xerox Corp is working with two Bengaluru-based hospitals to test a technology that will allow regular cameras to detect health abnormalities. The American multinational's contactless sensing technology is being tried out at Manipal Hospital and St. John's Hospital.

"With our contactless sensing projects, we are able to use just a regular camera to observe a patient and infer the heart rate, detect heart issues such as atrial fibrillation," said Sophie Vandebroek, chief technology officer at Xerox. "This is a joint project between the India R&D centre and our PARC centre in New York."

Xerox has installed cameras at Manipal Hospital's neonatal units and is working with physicians there to measure babies' vital signs -heart rate, temperature, breathing, etc. The technology does away with attaching sensors to a child's skin.

Vandebroek said the same technology can be used to screen passengers at airports for various diseases and can also be used by consumers to monitor their own health.

A simple camera connected to an analytics software interprets images and analyses data to tell whether a person has a particular health problem or not, or whether there is a need to consult a doctor.

In India, Xerox's healthcare research is being led by Dr Satish Prasad Rath, who previously worked as Chief Medical Innovation Officer at Wipro and helped develop Wipro's smart healthcare devices.Xerox is also hiring doctors as consultants to build its expertise in the healthcare domain.

Earlier this month, Xerox invested in a startup called HealthSpot, which builds telemedicine kiosks that can be placed in stores, companies, pharmacies, etc. The kiosks are equipped with diagnostic equipment with built-in sensors. "In the future, instead of having these physical sensors, you can just have a display with a camera, which can do all the diagnostics," Vandebroek said.

According to Vandebroek, Xerox could look at offering this technology directly to consumers. The project has already solved problems such as monitoring temperature, respiration rate and heart rate using a regular webcam, Vandebroek said. "Some of the areas we are still working on are blood pressure and oxygen saturation levels. When it comes to disease diagnostics, we have done atrial fibrillation, there's work going on asthma detection and breast cancer screening. We are also working on SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome)."


Healthcare contributes about 10 per cent to Xerox global revenue.The company is increasing its investments in healthcare as its printing business is on a decline. Printing, which used to be Xerox's core business, now contributes only about 40 per cent to its revenue. On the other hand, the company expects its IT services business to contribute to 75 per cent of its revenue by 2017.

HOW IT WORKS: A camera is connected to the analytics software and analyses data to detect whether a person has a particular health problem or not, or whether there is a need to consult a doctor.
WHAT IT IS DOING

Xerox has been working with Manipal Hospital and St. John's Hospital in Bengaluru to test this technology The transnational has installed cameras at Manipal Hospital's neonatal units to measure the heart rate, temperature and breathing The tech avoids attaching sensors to a child's fragile skin The project has already solved problems such as monitoring temperature, respiration rate, heart rate using a regular webcam.