Sam Brusco, Associate Editor12.02.21
Contactless respiratory monitoring company Sounds Life Sciences has earned FDA 510(k) clearance for its smartphone/smartspeaker app that generates ultrasonic sonar pulses to detect reflections caused by nearby patient respiration.
The prescription-only app can be used at home or in the clinic to measure breathing. The company tested patients with COPD, asthma, congestive heart failure, and anxiety for its FDA submission.
“We’re using this regulatory momentum to accelerate commercialization of our technology and begin to identify select partners to bring our software to market,” Jacob Sunshine, MD, chief medical officer and co-founder of Sound Life Sciences told the press. “This is just the beginning. With this foundational clearance we have established a regulatory foothold, from which we can build out additional use cases including for respiratory chronic disease management such as asthma and COPD, opioid safety monitoring, infant monitoring, incipient respiratory infection detection and identifying when an unwitnessed cardiac arrest occurs. There are many clinical conditions you can point this at and we are laser focused on conditions where detecting aberrant breathing can lead to an evidence-based intervention and clearly provide value.”
“It’s critical that our contactless technology utilizes devices like a smartphone or even smartspeaker platforms which are familiar to most patients, and offers health care providers in a telehealth setting critical information to make the most informed clinical decisions for their patients,” added Shyam Gollakota, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Sound Life Sciences. “Because Sound Life Sciences leverages ubiquitous devices, our technology can rapidly and unobtrusively scale to serve large and diverse populations in both urban and rural communities, especially as it does not require any additional hardware.”
Sound Life Sciences received over $2.5 million from the National Institutes of Health and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
The prescription-only app can be used at home or in the clinic to measure breathing. The company tested patients with COPD, asthma, congestive heart failure, and anxiety for its FDA submission.
“We’re using this regulatory momentum to accelerate commercialization of our technology and begin to identify select partners to bring our software to market,” Jacob Sunshine, MD, chief medical officer and co-founder of Sound Life Sciences told the press. “This is just the beginning. With this foundational clearance we have established a regulatory foothold, from which we can build out additional use cases including for respiratory chronic disease management such as asthma and COPD, opioid safety monitoring, infant monitoring, incipient respiratory infection detection and identifying when an unwitnessed cardiac arrest occurs. There are many clinical conditions you can point this at and we are laser focused on conditions where detecting aberrant breathing can lead to an evidence-based intervention and clearly provide value.”
“It’s critical that our contactless technology utilizes devices like a smartphone or even smartspeaker platforms which are familiar to most patients, and offers health care providers in a telehealth setting critical information to make the most informed clinical decisions for their patients,” added Shyam Gollakota, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Sound Life Sciences. “Because Sound Life Sciences leverages ubiquitous devices, our technology can rapidly and unobtrusively scale to serve large and diverse populations in both urban and rural communities, especially as it does not require any additional hardware.”
Sound Life Sciences received over $2.5 million from the National Institutes of Health and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).