Cardiex Ltd (ASX:CDX) has made progress on its wearable device strategy along with partnerships and commercialisation plans.
In an update, chief executive officer Craig Cooper said there had been developments relating to CardieX’s co-development and investment partner Blumio, the JDA with Mobvoi, and the company’s recent wearable sensor technology breakthrough.
He said the company’s strategy continued to focus on developing the first 'uncalibrated', non-invasive and cuffless wearable sensor for monitoring blood pressure and other cardiovascular health vital signs, which is considered to be one of the 'Holy Grails' in wearable health-tech monitoring.
Developing wearable sensor technology
“There are existing wearable blood pressure monitors in the market that use sensors, but for those few that have FDA approval they all require calibration – meaning that they have to be used in conjunction with a standard blood pressure (BP) monitoring device – so they are not considered to be satisfactory for clinical or user-friendly consumer applications.
“Our strategy for achieving this 'Holy Grail' remains focused on developing the first 'uncalibrated' wearable sensor technology that can be used independently and without the need for a separate device for calibration or an invasive inflatable cuff.
“This development will open up significant commercial opportunities for us in both medical and consumer markets.”
Shares have been up to 20% higher to 2.4 cents intra-day.
Three medical markets
Cooper outlined three medical markets:
- The massive global market for 24-hour ambulatory patient monitoring with 1.56 billion people estimated to have hypertension by 2025;
- General patient monitoring - an uncalibrated wearable BP sensor would displace the need for an invasive arterial line needing to be placed in patients during hospital admissions, with upwards of 316 million hospital admissions annually in the USA alone; and
- Vascular disease monitoring – an uncalibrated sensor can also be applied to monitor vascular disease at the extremities, such as ankles and limbs - up to 20% of individuals over 60 years of age have some form of vascular disease, and this is a market that is increasing due to the growing prevalence of disorders such as diabetes.
Cooper said: “Our partnerships and development efforts with Blumio, Mobvoi, and the development of our own CardieX Sensor Development Kit are driven towards meeting these commercial consumer goals.”
The company’s collaboration with Blumio comprises two parts:
- Co-Development Agreement (CDA) that provides for the integration of CardieX’s algorithms and SphygmoCor® technology into the Blumio sensor allowing for a unique and patented set of cardiovascular data features to be extracted by the Blumio sensor; and
- An investment by CDX in Blumio for 7.5% of Blumio with a potential to increase to 10% (for no additional cash investment) based on the achievement of certain additional milestones.
CardieX continues to integrate its algorithms and technology into the Blumio sensor under the CDA and has met all important milestones and technology standards to date.
Given the nature of the development activities under the CDA, Blumio and CardieX continue to operate remotely with little impact on day-to-day operations resulting from current global conditions.
Release of Blumio Development Kit
Blumio has also recently completed its first-generation sensor development kit as one of the milestones under the CDA.
This kit consists of a radar sensor board, a wearable enclosure and a small processing unit which runs algorithms that generate an arterial waveform in real-time.
This is the first step towards making Blumio’s sensor technology commercially available to device makers as the kit enables their partners, including CardieX, to continue to execute their product development efforts in parallel.
Mobvoi & CardieX JDA
CardieX has a joint development agreement (JDA) with Mobvoi for the development of novel and proprietary health technologies, applications and features to be integrated into Mobvoi’s next generation of watches and smart devices.
Mobvoi is Google’s in-country partner for Google’s Wearable OS platform in China. Mobvoi’s investors include Google, Volkswagen and Sequoia Ventures.
Separate to Blumio, the partnership with Mobvoi focuses on the use of the global standard in consumer sensor technology – the PPG sensor (photoplethysmogram - used to detect blood volume changes in the microvascular bed of tissue).
Mobvoi and CardieX continue to operate remotely with little impact on day-to-day operations resulting from current global conditions.
Importantly, CardieX’s ongoing communications with Mobvoi have been with the full China-based team all gathered physically together and working from directly the Mobvoi corporate office.
PPG sensor kit development
The company is moving forward with the development of a commercial sensor development kit (CSDK) including a reference design for a PPG sensor together with CardieX algorithms.
This CSDK would allow other device makers such as Garmin, Apple, Fitbit etc, to incorporate CDX's development kit into their devices given that they use the same PPG sensor technology.
The next phase of the CSDK will include further advanced algorithms and features that will become commercially available in Q2, 2021 for licence to third-party device makers.
