ObvioHealth Announces Partnership with Hyfe, Integrating AI Technology for Tracking and Analyzing Coughs to Expand Data Tools for Decentralized Clinical Trials

ObvioHealth, a global Virtual Research Organization (VRO), announces a new partnership with Hyfe AI, an artificial intelligence company with a tool to detect and track acoustic signatures, with an initial focus on coughing. ObvioHealth will integrate Hyfe’s technology into its decentralized clinical trials platform and smartphone app to capture and analyze coughing events. The technology collects data in real time, as the event happens, and transmits the data to a dashboard, where clinical researchers analyze coughing frequency, severity, and type.

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“The ability for someone to recall how many times he/she coughed in a single day is difficult, resulting in patient reported outcomes that are riddled with inaccuracies,” said Iulian Circo, co-founder of Hyfe. “Our coughing diagnostic tool reveals patterns and correlations, giving clinical researchers an unprecedented level of fidelity.”

Hyfe is one of several third party partnerships initiated by ObvioHealth as part of its strategic roadmap to build longitudinal and unstructured data collection and evaluation capabilities that can improve the measurement of symptoms. ObvioHealth is currently conducting research on babies’ cries, incorporating audio capture features into its app to collect recordings and use them to train algorithms to quantify the duration and frequency of crying episodes.

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The implications extend beyond acoustic to visual signatures, as well. ObvioHealth’s decentralized platform was recently used for an observational infant stool study, where, in addition to asking parents to rate their childs’ stools based on the Bristol Stool Scale, the study required parents to take photos of their childrens’ soiled diapers through the ObvioHealth app. The images were automatically uploaded and analyzed by expert raters. ObvioHealth data scientists are now training algorithms to read and score the images based on those annotations. Early results show machine learning scores that are on par with those of expert raters.

“These digital instruments are improving the way data is collected and analyzed for clinical research,” said Ivan Jarry, ObvioHealth’s CEO. “Not only do these tools reduce the burden on study participants and deliver more accurate data, they also open the door to new and deeper ways to analyze unstructured data that will deliver novel outcomes going forward. That is why we’re so excited to announce our partnership with Hyfe and are already seeing the fruits of collaboration.”

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