Itamar Medical Ltd. medical device and digital health company focused on the integration of sleep apnea management into the cardiac patient care pathway, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire technology and assets of Spry Health for an undisclosed cash amount. Spry, based in the San Francisco Bay area, develops a wrist based medical grade remote patient monitoring (RPM) solutions.
 
“As we sought opportunities to build on our vision of expanding sleep apnea diagnostics from a single-night test to continuous remote patient monitoring, we identified the technology commercialized by Spry Health as a perfect fit,” said Gilad Glick, President and Chief Executive Officer of Itamar Medical. “The acquisition of their FDA-cleared, wrist-worn technology and the addition of a knowledgeable pool of selected talented engineers, led by Spry co-founder and CTO Elad Ferber, provides an excellent platform for us to jump start our development initiatives to bring to market a continuous sleep apnea monitoring device to further support chronic disease management, particularly as it contributes to the added burden on cardiovascular disease.
 
“While finger-based monitoring yields the highest accuracy, it is currently not suitable for longer-term wear. A device that is designed for the wrist, while potentially less accurate for precise disease diagnostics, is more suitable for monitoring the continuous accumulated burden of sleep apnea and its potential impact on other diseases, such as cardiovascular conditions, due to its wearability over weeks or months," added Glick.
 
Spry’s patented technology is delivered through a watch-like home-based monitoring medical device called the Loop System. The Loop System is FDA-cleared and based on an extensive set of sensing technologies and algorithms that contextualize real-time, continuous physiologic data to flag signs of patient deterioration using bio-markers such as SpO2, respiration rate, and heart rate. These three signals, combined with Itamar’s core expertise in the Peripheral Arterial Tonometry (PAT), form the foundation for continuous sleep apnea monitoring. Itamar anticipates commencing development of a new wrist-worn device immediately, with initial market launch timing anticipated in 2022.
 
The total global RPM market in 2019 was estimated to be approximately $800 million and expected to reach approximately $2 billion in 2027. North America represented the largest share of the global market at approximately 38 percent, primarily attributed to rising cardiovascular disease¹.
 
“Sleep apnea is a serious and common respiratory disorder. Recent studies have shown that 50-80 percent of patients with cardiovascular disease including hypertension, stroke, atrial fibrillation and HF have significant sleep apnea—and patients with uncontrolled sleep apnea are more likely to have worse outcomes including uncontrolled hypertension, refractory afib and higher mortality. Enabling cardiac-based RPM programs in patients with CV disease will almost certainly be a game changer in helping us identify sleep apnea—and its burden—earlier in these patients and lead to better outcomes across the board,” said Dan Bensimhon, MD Medical Director Advanced Heart Failure & Mechanical Circulatory Support at Moses Cone Health.
 
“We also believe that pulmonologists, which are predominantly our current WatchPAT customers, will gain the added benefit of RPM in monitoring patients with overlap sleep-apnea/COPD syndrome, a condition that can increase death sevenfold²,” concluded Glick.

References
¹ Reports and Data: Remote Patient Monitoring, June 2020
² Annals of the American Thoracic Society: High Prevalence of Obstructive Sleep Apnea in Patients with Moderate to Severe Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, August 2015