Aly: A scalable remote monitoring system for infectious diseases

We propose Aly, an ally for chronic patients, families, health care systems, government, and researchers in three in house implemented prototypes to be a wearable device, a mobile application, and a platform that act coordinately to acquire, monitor, and analyze vital signs and symptoms to predict and prevent infectious diseases.

Aly is a team product of collaboration between the Engineering, Medicine,  Design and architecture Schools led by Germán Andrés Sánchez Sarmiento, PhD student in Engineering

Aly wants to foster centralized data acquisition, families and health care systems monitoring, analytics for decision making, and government public policies implementation. This lack of centralized systems causes delay in patients' diagnosis, earlier spread of infectious diseases, and once patients are diagnosed health care systems spend more resources, hospital capacity in giving treatments to advanced patients. Therefore, the government has a need to better monitor patients at earlier stages of contagion and have an input to anticipate populations contagion and then generate on time policies to prevent outbreaks. 

Aly has a pilot using SARS-CoV-19 in low income countries, where the pilot test is about to be performed. COVID-19 in Colombia has reported up to 67.000 Deaths in 2020-2021 and up to 3 million deaths over the world, occupying even 95% of the bed capacity in the largest cities such as Bogotá and Medellin with patients in an advanced state of the disease. Actions taken by governments about quarantines present a lack of updated information and predictive strategies to control population´s behavior to reduce outbreak contagion rates. Thus, remotely monitoring with Aly can foster on time disease diagnosis, augment hospitals capacity and monitoring systems,  and government inputs can be improved.

Our solution address solutions of the following users:

• 18+ Patients with COVID-19  comorbidities reported by the world health organization at https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/ncds/un-interagency-task-force-on-ncds/uniatf-policy-brief-ncds-and-covid-030920-poster.pdf?ua=1. Aly delivers  our wristband, instructions and access to Aly mobile application. They can monitor they vital signs and have a digital record of the different variables for autonomous decision making. Additionally, they can consult the automatic computation of COVID-19 risk and doctor´s advice. 

• Private and public health care providers: In Colombia, once we finish tests of our prototype, we will meet with Compensar, a private health care provider and Secretarias de salud, to present and evaluate the possibility to use Aly at their Institutional Health Service Providers, so doctors can monitor patients, have inputs for decision making and have a way to communicate with their patients. 

• Government and researchers would get benefited by having access to the aggregated data of all the users to monitor population health and evaluate if designed interventions have a positive result. 

Our decisions are supported by the research director of the School of medicine, who has led a communication with patients at Fundación Santafé in Bogota and Secretariat of Health doctors and executives.

Aly was born as a public initiative, where it seeks to provide a solution to the problem that the covid 19 contingency is generating at the national and global level in different underdeveloped countries, such as the example of Colombia. Therefore, our system provides vital tools for the government to make decisions regarding the evolution of the pandemic. Thus, we visualize the past, actual and possible future of the flue. So the government can monitor, trace, and therefore understand the movement of the pandemic by tracking users who show symptoms of the virus, paying immediate attention to them, prioritizing them so that they can reduce the mortality rate, giving these patients more expeditious care and as a result, avoiding the saturation of ICU beds, investing better their resources. Additionally, with the data collected through our devices, the platform will know the future behavior of the contagion points. Consequently, these will facilitate public policy decisions thanks to the predictions we provide, simplifying this task in terms of execution.

The significant impact of the project you can see in multiple situations:

• We reduce the number of deaths caused by the pandemic.

• We identify on time and follow up the sick and delicate people, knowing in approach the places that can be sources of contagion.

• The health centers can prepare for the level of capacity they will have as a cause of contagion. They will predict the areas that are centers of contagion and follow up the disease's evolution by regions and patients.

• Emergency doctors will have the necessary tools to give the best possible care, with the correct equipment, infrastructure, and knowledge for the estimated patients, with all the essential information at their hands, avoiding wasting time with examinations of routine going directly to attend to the emergency.

• We are giving collective well-being since information on everyone's health status is constantly available, making life easier for all our target users.

• In governments place, they will identify where is growing a new virus strain, directing their attention to it, and evaluate how the impact in the body's infected people by measuring vitals , without sending doctor, low investing in infrastructure, professionals and equipment, remotely, and handsome with the people. 

We are developing information reading technologies adding algorithms to estimate the evolution of different covid 19, refining the past ones over time. Additionally, expanding the product catalog to improve providing a health service, updating our platform, which will be dynamic over time in constant update, enhances the experience of different users. Also, our platform will adapt to other diseases that appear over time. For this reason, our economic and operational model is designed to be valid over time.

Our plan to measure and monitor the success of our Aly implementation is to use KPIs that show us two main things. One, how easy it has been to articulate the existing system with our proposed technology, and two, the level of resources saved thanks to our system. Let us understand resources such as time, energy, infrastructure, and personnel.

The first can be executed by a series of questions to the different users when operating some visualization action. If they wish, have an open response area where they can make recommendations that we can fix for the next version of the platform. We understand that it is always the service in constant evolution, as Windows, IOs, or the Adobe suite, to name a few examples.

For the second, we as developers need a monitor that constantly tells us if our algorithms provide relevant information about saving resources for the different actors. Thus, we show which ones do not meet the expectation level, allowing us to improve the algorithms continuously.

We currently have financing barriers since we are 2 of us in the product development team (platform, app, and device), and we need financing to hire people to help us develop things. Since we know what and how to do it at the knowledge level, we still need more hands to execute. The rest is covered because we already have the contacts to carry out the other points with financial support. We also have educational expenses and trips to knock on doors in search of opportunities.

Team leader also leads development of MIT media lab human dynamics group migration visualization Tool voyage viewer led by proffesor Alex 'Sandy' Pentland by executing a MISTI awarded in 2020. Further collaboration for this project is under evaluation. 

We would like to partner with MIT media lab HUman Dynamics group as Los Andes has been working in an awarded MISTI in 2020 in a project led by Professor Alex Pentland and Felipe Montes. Together, we have applied to IBD grants and are looking to foster new collaborations in data analysis. Additionally, we want to look for new collaborators to scale our project faster.