AI Productization Profile: Touchless Vitals Sensing - Wellness

Personal Background Overview

Savin Vijay, Senior Product Manager for Draganfly Vital Intelligence (VI), came to Draganfly with more than a decade of experience in software development and networking in India. Savin’s technical background is the strength he brings into the drone technology company developing innovative solutions combining computer vision, facial recognition, and machine learning.

I met Savin as fellow mentors for the MIT Sloan Enterprise Management Lab program, we were each leading MIT Sloan students through a project for our respective companies. Savin had brought Draganfly’s Vital Intelligence mobile tablet version with him on demo day and I marveled at my heartbeat, temperature, and blood oxygen level being detected by just standing still in front of the camera for 15 seconds. I was lucky enough to sit down with Savin virtually last week and discuss the opportunities and the challenges of bringing this new AI innovation to full productization.

Draganfly VI Overview

Draganfly Inc. is the creator of quality, cutting-edge drone solutions, software, and AI systems that revolutionize the way organizations do business and service their stakeholders. Recognized as being at the forefront of technology for over 22?years, Draganfly is an award-winning industry leader serving the public safety, agriculture, industrial inspections, security, mapping, and surveying markets. The company has a long history of using drone technology to aid law enforcement in keeping the public safe, assisting in search and rescues, working with emergency services, and collecting evidence for investigations.

The origin of Draganfly Vital Intelligence (VI) technology started during COVID times only two years ago when a client requested drone technology to assess social distancing and flag symptoms for those potentially infected. The initial solution simply used computer vision with real-time calculations to determine how well the 6 feet social distancing rule was being adhered to over a population without increasing risk of contagion. Then the solution was integrated with machine learning models to detect body temperature for signs of fevers. The full technical capabilities today can detect heart and respiratory rates, oxygen saturation, and body temperature as a touchless stand alone or mobile vitals monitoring solution. The only requirement is a RGB video stream from any mobile device camera. Real-time detection of the vitals is based on visual minutia that only the vision recognition model can differentiate such as blush pulsations, upper thorax movements, and red-to-green spectrum signature of skin blushing.

Industry

Healthcare, wellness

AI Technology Areas

Computer vision, facial recognition, machine learning

Opportunities

Though originally developed as a custom solution for a client, Draganfly quickly realized the vast potential for a variety of applications using the Vital Intelligence (VI) capability and created VI as a separate product line. Due to its origins related to prevention of COVID, the most similar opportunities for VI are focused on general wellness?with applications in locations like cruise lines, senior homes, correctional facilities and schools. But looking beyond outbreak prevention, neonatal care could be a perfect starting point when infants with complications at birth need reliable monitoring. Much of the time their tiny bodies and fragile skin do not lend easily to having sensors attached. For the general B2C market, touchless vitals monitoring usage scenarios for driver alertness detection can support the transition to autonomous driving and/or reduce traffic accidents caused by fatigue. Athletic performance monitoring or integration with fitness apps will challenge the real-time detection responsiveness but can open up highly profitable segments for users who do not like using wearables when they exercise.

Those are just a few use case opportunities leveraging the existing touchless vitals detection, but beyond that, the underlying model can also be enhanced to detect states such as stress, hunger or anger. New capabilities in this type of detection can create extremely meaningful applications in our schools and workplaces to help identify those in need. The potential social benefit can be enormous.

Challenges

Unlike AI technology startups, Draganfly VI is an in-house innovation incubation. The main bread-and-butter business of drone technology and solutions helped fund and refine the initial solution and make it end-user ready. This is a tremendous advantage when most new AI innovations still require large dollar and time investments to bring to MVP level. Both brains, technology and infrastructure required are shared across the rest of the business in Draganfly’s case. Any innovations and refinements that VI makes present an opportunity to integrate across platforms to maximize potential applications.

Even with these advantages, bringing Draganfly VI to full productization had significant challenges to work through. In the detection itself, variations in skin tone had major impact on the accuracy of detection that needed to be adjusted for in the training data corpus. But by far the largest challenge to overcome were consumer concerns around data privacy. There is a common user assumption that personally identifiable vitals data was stored and could be shared. This concern can easily overwhelm the value of touchless vitals monitoring if not properly solved for and the mitigation clearly communicated. The solution was to not store any of the vital monitoring raw data, but only the resulting diagnostic information. In addition, the VI team is working towards continued clinical validation and regulatory certification to enable additional use cases of the technology.

AI Productization Success

Savin had joined the Draganfly VI project before it was market ready. His technical background and understanding of the underlying AI are what made him the perfect product manager to bring this innovation to full market ready productization. The initial product success for Draganfly VI leveraged the existing sales relationships the team had with the customer’s urgent needs around virus outbreak prevention. The first wide adoption rolled out at correctional facilities in the southern states with the stand alone touchless Smart Vital Kiosk. It sped up intake and saved staff time. This stand-alone solution is being expanded to use in schools, hospitals and court houses this year. Many other partnerships are also under discussion.

Key Learning

In learning about AI productization in vitals monitoring, my key takeaway is that the simple user experience improvement of touchless monitoring is the core value creation in so many usage scenarios across vastly different industries. If the technology innovation removes user experience friction instead of adding it, you strike AI productization gold.

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