Industrial Automation Magazine India

Luminati participates in Covid-19 Task Force to test blood oxygen levels

Published on : Tuesday 31-03-2020

Sprint Covid-19 aims to prevent virus spread through widespread testing by smart devices.

Tel Aviv, March 30, 2020 – Sprint Covid-19, a task force led by the Innovation Department at Assuta Hospital in Ashdod, Israel, together with Rafael Advanced Technology and Weizmann Institute of Science, has today launched with the aim of increasing testing for the Coronavirus through smart devices. The group is working to develop a heuristic test that can be carried out on smartphones and smartwatches to identify asymptomatic, presymptomatic and mild cases which would otherwise go undetected.

The task force has set out to enhance large-scale Covid-19 testing, something that is proving a huge challenge for countries around the world. Through technology available on a number of smart devices, Sprint Covid-19 aims to measure users’ blood oxygen levels, which is seen as an important first step in identifying the virus.

“A large percentage of the coronavirus infected population may suffer from silent hypoxemia, i.e. hypoxemia without dyspnea,” said Myriam Bocobza who is heading the innovative research. “We now know that 50% of the coronavirus positive carriers did not feel any symptoms, so they kept wandering around infecting more people. In a bid to tackle this issue, we found that many smartphones or smartwatch devices enable testing your own blood oxygen levels and this could lead to identifying new and existing cases.”

“By testing blood oxygen levels, a lot of the contagion could have been prevented. The simple truth is that checking for fever before entering the shopping mall is just not enough. Oxygen levels in the blood need to be tested as well, if not more than body temperature.” said Bocobza.

Tracking and identifying compatible smart devices is a task that requires collecting massive amounts of openly available data from across the worldwide web. In just under 24 hours, Luminati Networks, a leading operator in the data collection automation industry, has processed a huge amount of data locating over 110 smartphone models, 165 models of smartwatches and smart bands that can conduct this simple test.

The Covid-19 task force plans to make the list of devices available to the Israeli public and the rest of the world shortly.