An innovative remote respiratory device created by Strados Labs has the potential to save patient lives and clinician’s time by reducing the burden on bedside nurses. As the number of positive cases of the COVID-19 virus continues to rise, there are growing concerns about overloaded healthcare workers and hospital systems.

Regular auscultation and checkups are required for patients experiencing respiratory distress or disease. However, as hospitals and intensive care units begin to fill up, the time between rounds will increase as nurses and doctors are stretched thin from the coronavirus outbreak. There are currently no effective ways for caregivers to capture abnormal patient lung sounds and patterns remotely, putting patients at risk for pulmonary decompensation between rounds and face-to-face visits.

Leading-edge technology from Strados Labs, the creator of the RESP System, is used to record patient lung sounds that can then be made available for playback, or transmitted to telehealth workers, to be monitored for changes in status.

Strados Labs is a health technology (HealthTech) startup in the Advanced Technology Development Center’s ATDC Accelerate portfolio of companies.

Its first-of-its-kind wireless, remote, e-stethoscope could be the answer to getting a patient’s breath sounds and status into the hands of remote intensivists and telehealth workers.

This remote, wearable stethoscope can be used for spot-checking and patient wear, reducing the burden on clinicians and bedside nurses. Additionally, physicians and nurses can experience noise fatigue as their hours are extended and patient ratio increases. Having a patient’s breath sounds available for playback and analysis for a fresh set of ears could allow clinicians to more effectively diagnose and treat patients.

For small community hospitals, resources are already limited. Having remote intensivists or monitors in their corner giving status updates could be the difference between a patient’s life and death.

The Strados System’s respiratory solution consists of a small, lightweight, non-invasive stethoscope that records lung sounds and uploads them to a digital clinician portal. Once the device has recorded the patient’s lung sounds, the clinician is able to access them remotely at any time for analysis. In the future, a proprietary algorithm may process and extract respiratory acoustics to highlight any changes in respiratory patterns for physician analysis.

Strados is working with telehealth companies to deploy devices for use in remote care and triage settings, as well as clinical research organizations currently working on novel respiratory vaccines for COVID-19. A cough is a key symptom in more than 70 percent of patients diagnosed with COVID-19, our goal is to remotely capture and quantify these symptoms for early detection, treatment, and interventions.

RESP is currently being used in several ongoing clinical trials.

“With the Strados device we can provide a more objective measurement of the success of acute treatment and we can store this information for future visits,” said Dr. Gregory Almond, chief of service of emergency medicine at New York Metropolitan Hospital. “I believe that this will be revolutionary to the respiratory health field and will be a significant cost savings measure for emergency room level care.”