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Interviewer: Professor John Rogers, thank you very much for
taking the time to do this interview with us today to discuss
the development of medical wearable devices
designed specifically to monitor COVID-19 symptoms.
First of all, can you tell us a little bit about the concept of medical wearable devices,
what they are and how they are used?
Prof. Rogers: Yeah. Well, first, let me thank you for having me on your program.
This is an area of technology that we've been interested in for the last 15 years or so.
This idea of medical grade or ICU grade wearable devices.
I think probably many of your listeners are familiar with wearables in general.
They represent now a quite significant sector in the consumer electronics gadgetry area.
Devices like Fitbit, the Apple watch,
the Oura ring are in widespread use these days.
They're valuable for tracking fitness,
qualitative measurements of health status,
you can measure body kinematics,
you can count steps.
In some cases, you can get a rough estimate of heart rate.
But I think what people are contemplating now is
a next generation of wearable devices that integrate with the body and are
differentiated from existing wearables by the fact that they produce
data streams that correlate quantitatively to the measurements that are made in hospital,
and laboratory settings, but which are performed
continuously during natural daily activities and can really
represent the source of tremendous amounts of data that can yield to
