Hexoskin Health

Author
Team Zorg Enablers
Published on
22-11-2021
Category
Implementations | Prevention and Healthy living

 

As the growth of people with chronic conditions continuous and healthcare workers form a bottleneck to meet the growing care demand, we need to find a way to keep patients safe at home. Hexoskin provides interoperable software solutions, secure and private infrastructure and data science services to support research and professional organizations. The company designed the Hexoskin Connected Health platform a system to minimize user setup time and to maximize vital signs monitoring over long periods in a non-obstructive way with hidden sensors embedded in a very thin Smart Shirt. Its Smart Garments are clinically validated and are developed involving patients and clients to be comfortable and easy to use for continuously monitoring precise data during daily activities and sleep. Pierre-Alexandre Fournier co-founder of Hexoskin states: “Monitoring should be part of your life, and shouldn’t look like you’re experiencing health problems.

 

 

Hexoskin’s mission has always been to make the precise health data collected by its body-worn sensors accessible and useful for everyone. “Artificial Intelligence has the potential to automate tasks we do in healthcare. When we started the company back in 2006, the existing technologies to report rich health data continuously didn’t exist. Healthcare was still developing its digital infrastructure”, tells Fournier. While current techstart-ups directly focus on healthcare, the company firstly build on experience, trust and evidence in the past 15 years. “We believe its important for our users to understand how the data is collected and interpreted. And the most important thing is to go ask questions to end-users and make surround your team with people that are able to give feedback on where we’re going. For digital health i.e. doctors, nurses and administrators. End-users in healthcare need to be motivated and prepared to adopt the digital tools. Digital health is a lot about change management, because most of the digital applications often already exist in other industries”, Fournier states. Today, part of Hexoskin’s success can be attributed to its community of developers and scientists that are leveraging its Connected Health Platform to create new applications and interventions not possible just a few years ago. Their smart clothing has been used in over 110 scientific publications that validated their platform, mostly focusing on cardiac, pulmonary and activity topics.

In 2013 the company introduced the first washable Smart Shirts that captures cardiac, respiratory, and activity body metrics. Today, the Hexoskin Connected Platform is used worldwide and supported thousands of users and organizations to achieve their goals. The shirts have been used by patients in clinical trials living with chronic cardiac & respiratory conditions, professional athletes to optimize their physical conditioning, and even astronauts to train for space missions. Users can access from anywhere an online dashboard with advanced reporting and analytics functionalities. Since 2011, Hexoskin also collaborated with the Canadian Space Agency, a breakthrough for the development of the company by providing the right conditions like funding and credibility. By now, Astroskin, a cutting edge Space Grade Smart Garment, is used in the International Space Station to monitor the astronauts’ health in Space. Their Astroskin Vital Signs Monitoring Platform offers state-of-the-art continuous real-time monitoring for 48 hours of blood pressure, pulse oximetry, 3-lead ECG, respiration, skin temperature, and activity.

Fournier: “The Astroskin is our high-end platform, to be used for example in the space missions, but more and more people and researchers are also using the platform.” In addition, Hexoskin can ease the burdens of stress on healthcare workers. “The COVID-19 pandemic has brought more burden to healthcare workers with the already high workload, the long hours, and the demanding work conditions, contributing to an increase of occupational stress, anxiety, and depression among frontline healthcare workers. By providing the evidence needed to support clinical decisions, we can reduce the workload. In addition, COVID-19 has enlarged the funding for digital health applications.” Fournier: “We hope to bring the innovations developed for Space and its Hexoskin Connected Health Platform to support the growing need to provide patients’ access to affordable and adapted healthcare services remotely. And to replicate our tools abroad the US. People are now at a point that they accept the technology and are just awaiting FDA approvel to use the technology.” Future applications include healthcare and clinical research, chronic disease management, sleep medicine, aging at home, security & defense, and space exploration missions (i.e. the Virgin Galactic Space Mission). But there is still a lot of research and development still to be done, Fournier admits.

Hexoskin Health

Co-founder Pierre-Alexandre Fournier started Hexoskin back in 2006. Since then, the company has develop two continuous monitoring platforms, the Hexoskin Connected Health Platform and the Astroskin Vital Signs Monitoring System. Both platform use smart garments to monitor patients and clients during daily activities and sleep.