At the end of September,Chronolife and Garmin Health announced a partnership, designed initially to cover Europe, as a result of which Chronolife’s remote monitoring services for patients who are at risk or suffer from chronic pathologies, will be enhanced by the involvement of Garmin.
Paris-based Chronolife, a connected health services operator monitoring patients or individuals at risk, was founded seven years ago. Its interoperable platform not only incorporates medical and physiological data collected via Keesense, its health-certified smart t-shirts, it also able to operate with third-party devices. It provides continuous, real-life multiparametric monitoring of patients after they leave hospital, following a cardiac event or a respiratory disorder.
This is what appealed to Garmin Health as it was keen to expand into the BtoB market and needed to find a certified health partner with an open platform, capable of recovering and handling the data generated by Garmin connected watches and making them available to its corporate customers. The French startup will incorporate into its platform the US leader’s connected watches, which up until now were only used for wellness and fitness applications. The benefit is mutual.
“This partnership with Garmin Health will enable Chronolife to offer even greater precision in the monitoring of pathologies and diagnostics and risk assessment, by collecting Garmin data (quality of sleep, blood oxygen levels etc.), additional to the data generated by our certified textiles. Whereas some may consider that connected t-shirts are in competition with connected watches, we show that these wearables are in fact complementary, and we are thus expanding our areas of expertise in application markets and use cases,” Laurent Vandebrouck, CEO of Chronolife.
The services developed by Chronolife, and this combined offer, aim to improve the quality of life of patients and their compliance with the medical protocol as, in the words of Laurent Vandebrouck “in order to remotely monitor patients with chronic pathologies, the patients must be able to live a normal life and forget that they are being monitored. Our smart textile, in the form of a t-shirt, offers two advantages – we can put sensors at the place where the signal is generated and thus obtain accurate data, for example for an electrocardiogram or thoracic respiration, plus it has the advantage of being fully machine washable.” France has thus developed patented technologies that they put to good use in new generations of wearables in the service of the medical and corporate world. It is the only health-certified textile in the world that is fully machine washable.
This t-shirt generates six items of physiological data – electrocardiogram, thoracic respiration, abdominal respiration, pulmonary impedance, body temperature and physical activity. These continuous data are accessible via a Bluetooth interface incorporated into the connected garment and linked to an application on the patient’s smartphone. The encrypted data are sent to a server, where the health indicators are combined and forwarded to the healthcare professional. He/She can in this way provide more accurate monitoring and diagnostics, and assess the risks based on the multiple data elements gathered (heart rate, respiratory rate, QT interval, extrasystoles,…).
The company has already produced 2,000 t-shirts and will produce a new series of 3,000 articles. They are recharged by induction in 3 hours, and have an autonomy of 48 hours.
Marketing combined Chronolife/Garmin products is expected to start in early 2023, which allows time to finalize the incorporation of the Garmin connected watches into the Chronolife interface and platform and to implement the logistics. This combined offer will address three markets: research centers and universities for their studies, the pharmaceutical groups market for therapeutic efficacy programs requiring the collection of data on the effect of molecules and drugs, and the corporate market, in particular for isolated workers or workers in dangerous areas and employees at risk, on a voluntary basis.