Backed by $28 million in investment, Israeli biotech company Art Medical, which detects and prevents life-threatening complications in intensive care units, is introducing a new platform that collects comprehensive patient data using sensor-based smart tubes, which will be utilized to reduce the risk of medical complications.
The smart tube technology uses sensors to collect data, and adjusts itself to a patient’s individual needs as they arise.
Oftentimes patients in ICUs become well-accustomed to tubes: breathing tubes, feeding tubes and urine catheters among them. But to date there’s no effective way to determine whether they’re experiencing complications in real time. Nurses and doctors are required to constantly monitor patients in order to identify these events and minimize their complications, but that’s done manually, and can easily overlook time-sensitive events that can lead to complications, or even death.
Because patients have a high chance of getting pneumonia after just one week of being in the ICU -- typically caused by acid reflux or secretion -- Art Medical has developed a smart system to monitor gastric reflux, saliva and urine output continuously and automatically. It detects and alerts the attending nurse and physician of any abnormalities during tube procedures, prompting them to take necessary action.
The Smart Sensor-Based Tubes Platform detects gastric reflux and secretion, which can cause aspiration pneumonia and ventilator-associated pneumonia. Those pose dangerous complications for ICU patients, resulting in a prolonged length of stay and a higher risk of mortality; plus, they’re both unrelated to the original reason for hospitalization. The new tubes platform enables ICU caregivers to provide more personalized treatment for patients by using untapped data that hasn’t yet been collected or monitored.
Just this past June, Art Medical raised $20 million in a funding round led by Advanced Medical Technologies. Founded in 2009, Art Medical previously raised $7 million from a combination of funding from the Israel Innovation Authority and Bill Gates’ Grand Challenge. In the eight years since founding, the company has been working on a suite of connected, sensor-laden tubes to continuously monitor for complications and collect data of patients in the ICU.
