The Dozee Story: How F1 Cars And A Sleeping Dog Changed Indian Healthcare Dozee is India's 1st AI-based contactless Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) and Early Warning System (EWS) for continuous patient monitoring.
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The 9th edition of the Innovation for India Awards by Marico held recently highlighted some amazing work by individuals that has changed the lives of people in various ways. One of these was the story of Dozee, India's 1st AI-based contactless Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) and Early Warning System (EWS) for continuous patient monitoring with a mission to develop and deploy intelligent technologies, solutions, and networks to provide a continuum of care, early warning systems, and responses to save lives.
But let's skip these technical terms for a bit and focus on how the innovation came into being, as the founder Mudit Dandwate narrated it on stage before receiving the award.
Dandwate was always fascinated by the amount of sophistication that was put into the making of a Formula 1 car. After graduation, he joined a company where he would provide analytics and simulation software to high performance car manufacturers and loved his job.
"But on February 1, 2015, the day I turned 24, things suddenly changed. I learned that we nearly lost a family member because of poor monitoring and delayed intervention in a hospital. I was upset that here I am monitoring health of the cars to make them faster, but we are losing humans because of lack of monitoring. I shared the incident with my colleague and now my co-founder Gaurav (Parchani), who also believed that there is a huge gap in patient safety in hospitals," Dandwate shared with the 850 members present in the audience.
Both the mechanical engineers from IIT continued brainstorming for the next seven days and came up with an idea. "What if the way we use to monitor vibrations to capture health of the car, the same method is used to capture the health of human body as well?" They began researching and found some century old research papers on ballistocardiography, a science of extracting biomarkers from vibrations. However, the designs were extremely complex and they realized that they needed to entirely overhaul the design. It was then that they let go of their jobs and Gaurav even let go of his prestigious Masters program at Carnegie Mellon. After six months of intense hard work, they had the first prototype that, when in contact with the patient, would give heartbeats.
"I still remember we were so excited that we wanted to celebrate with a cup of chai at the nearby tea stall. But there was a challenge, our dog Pai. We were afraid that this naughty dog would damage the sensor sheet in our absence. So to protect it from it from him, we placed it under the mattress and left. When we were back we found him sleeping on the same bed. To our surprise the sensor placed under a six-inch mattress was capturing his heartbeats perfectly. This was our eureka moment! Thanks to Pie we made the sensors contactless. This also inspired the name Dozee, because all that the user had to do is sleep or doze on it and it monitors your health. We knew being contactless was going to be our biggest differentiator, but we wanted to be 100 per cent sure that we are as accurate as ICU grade equipment before we launch it in hospitals. That's when we collaborated with specialist labs to train our AI algorithms and it took us about four years to do that," he said.
Dozee tracks vital parameters such as the heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen saturation, and skin temperature with clinical grade accuracy, and tracks sleep quality while flagging indicators of sleep apnea. By automating patient monitoring through Dozee, nearly 2.5 hours of nursing time is saved every day per patient. It is a 'Made in India' innovation with global standards in patient safety, data security, privacy, and reliability.
Even today in hospitals, mishaps because of suboptimal monitoring and nursing shortage is quite prevalent and Dozee is addressing that in more than 350 hospitals across country. In the last 12 months, they have saved more than 25,00,000 nursing hours and delivered more than 8000 lifesaving alerts. What started with two humans and a dog today is a 250 member strong organization with one common vision: #HarBedDozeeBed.
The author can be reached at bkabir@entrepreneurindia.com and Instagram.com/kabirsinghbhandari
