Circadia C100 System

Circadia’s C100 System [Image courtesy of Circadia]

Healthcare staff monitoring COVID-19 patients for respiratory distress will have a new radar-powered tool at their disposal thanks to an expedited FDA clearance for Circadia Health.

London-based Circadia Health announced today the agency gave a green light to its Contactless Respiration Rate (CResp) monitoring systems and c100 device.

“Our C100 uses radar to wirelessly look at your breathing pattern from up to four feet away,” says Fares Siddiqui, co-founder and CEO of Circadia, told the DeviceTalks Weekly podcast. “From that we can pick up your respiratory rate and patterns and then apply machine learning in order to predict and prevent respiratory complications.”

For example, Siddiqui said, “breathlessness” is one of the early signs of distress in COVID-19 patients. “We can pick that up and enable timely interventions effectively.”

The system could free up staff from measuring respiratory rate manually through visual counting of breaths per minute.

The C100 features a radar sensor, proprietary radar Signal Analysis Technology (rSAT®), and cloud-based software for early detection of patient deterioration to augment clinical decision making. The company suggests that staff shortages result in this parameter being frequently measured incorrectly or not at all.

Circadia’s Contactless respiration rate addresses the known limitations of pulse oximetry and other wearables, offering long-term respiration data effortlessly to enable effective triage and ongoing care management. Circadia will be launching the C100 immediately for both hospitals and skilled nursing centers.

Circadia also has developed rSAT and AI-powered algorithms offer monitoring of motion, presence, and sleep quality. “We are building a ubiquitous data-driven platform, utilizing long-term continuous physiological parameters that we capture using our technology to develop proprietary early warning risk scores for various medical conditions,” said Guy Leschziner, MD, chief medical officer of Circadia.

Circadia was founded in 2016 by Imperial College London alumni Fares Siddiqui and Michal Maslik.

The company’s investors include Village Global, an investor network that draws support from wealthy individuals including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. SOSV, Particular Ventures and angel investors have also committed capital, Siddiqui said.