As a company, we have been asked many a times by investors -
''How does your device differentiate from the other wearables out in the market ?''
To address this query in a more comprehensive manner, we conducted an exercise.
Background - We used Your Cue's device (The Cue ring) to monitor a person who we are going to call Alex, while they slept.
We created graphs that visually represents the differences in frequency of data collection between our device and other scenarios. Specifically, we compared a hospital ward setting, monitoring by a healthcare assistant or a family member, using a consumer wearable licensed for health and fitness monitoring and our device.
Frequency of readings-
1- In a hospital ward, a nurse typically monitors a person once every 4-6 hours. Hence only 2 data points would have been observed, once at the beginning and once at the end.
2- Should the patient be monitored at home via a healthcare assistant or a family member, they would have monitored the vital signs once every hour.
3- Using a consumer wearable licensed for health and fitness monitoring, it would have monitored the vital signs every 5 minutes approximately.
4- Our device read their vital signs every 3 seconds, thus creating an in-depth analysis of the changes in their heart rate, blood oxygen and skin temperature.
It must be noted that our sensors also give out a confidence rating for every reading that they take and we have filtered the output to only showcase readings above 90% of confidence.
Observations - Alex had significant drops in Spo2 levels as they slept between 02:50 am and 03:40 am, once almost touching 70%. While their heart rate and skin temperature were relatively stable.
The other 3 frequencies of observation would have been unable to capture the blood oxygen saturation drop as it happened multiple times but within a very short span of time.
We believe this shows the importance of continuous monitoring on a very small scale and we are still studying the optimum frequency of taking reading vital signs, something that will only be determined with time.
Stay tuned to find out how our device performs in the next exercise! See you then.