Eka Care, a connected healthcare platform founded by former Co-Founders of Goibibo, has launched a scientific mobile-based feature on the app to track their pulse rate, a basic yet essential body vital.
Tracking the vitality can assist users in understanding when they need to seek medical advice. It can also help doctors understand their patients better and offer better healthcare. Eka Care has launched the Heart Rate Monitor in collaboration with Father Muller (FM) Medical College and Hospital.
This feature will be available completely free for the user. This device uses Photoplethysmography technology that has revolutionized how we interact with body vitals and enabled their continuous monitoring through portable devices.
Dr Sankalp Gulati, PhD, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and Signal Processing, Eka Care, said, “We strongly believe that technology is the answer to some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. A reliable and affordable solution to monitor and manage one’s health is critical to better health outcomes.”
The technology
The Eka Heart Rate Monitor (EHRM) uses the reflective mode principle for obtaining PPG signals to compute pulse rate. This feature can be accessed through Eka Care’s android mobile application.
To demonstrate the accuracy and reliability of EPRM, the startup has built a diverse validation dataset of PPG comprising 10,000 patients in OPD and ICU settings, in collaboration with Father Muller (FM) Medical College and Hospital.
So far, data of more than 5,700 patients has been collected from five different centers of FM Hospital across its rural and urban centers.
The company has a bank of rich dataset
The company’s dataset is rich in terms of gender and age distribution, wherein they procure data of patients with ages ranging from 12 to 90 years. The dataset has a significant number of patients suffering from Hypertension, Diabetes Mellitus, and Thyroid disorder. They were successful in gathering information about the comorbidities present in these patients.
Dr Neelesh Kapoor, MBBS, MD, Eka Care, said, “Pay Attention to your Resting Heart Rate. The Higher the rate, The Higher the Risk of Mortality. This adage has stood the test of time, and still today, the heart rate or the Pulse Rate remains one of the most important monitored and tracked vital parameters in the majority of individuals.”
“Access to health services, awareness of health issues, affordability, and the absence of skilled human resources remain key challenges in the country’s healthcare ecosystem. The capability to track one’s pulse rate using a mobile camera and that too as free of cost is a much-needed feature in this context for the majority of Indian citizens,” added Dr Neelesh.
The platform available in 12 languages enables every Indian family to create multiple health profiles and store health records such as vaccination charts for kids, developmental milestones, prescriptions, lab reports, and scans.
Eka Care, which already has over 1 million downloads, allows users to share records with healthcare providers. Symptoms Checker, a unique feature, enables doctors to efficiently and effectively diagnose underlying medical conditions while enhancing reporting capabilities for patients.
