Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is leveraging the Consumer Electronics Show’s (CES) national platform to introduce smart medical innovations. The solutions debuting at the five-day event include the High-Privacy AI Digital Caregiver, the Intelligent Medical Assistant Solution (iMAS), Janus, MedBobi, and iKNOBeads. 

The High-Privacy AI Digital Caregiver, co-developed by ITRI and Streamteck, is an advanced remote monitoring system that uses thermal imaging and millimeter wave radar technologies to detect patients’ vital signs and activities with hospital-level accuracy while maintaining privacy. The system tracks bed exits, falls, and prolonged inactivity, and promptly alerts caregivers through a mobile app when abnormalities are detected. With its compact design, it is best suited for clinics, wards, nursing homes, and homes, offering a cost-effective telemedicine solution.

The High-Privacy AI Digital Caregiver features:

• Privacy thermal imaging: This innovation eliminates the need for cameras, ensuring patient privacy. With a fine resolution of 3.75 cm (compared to a competitor’s 60 cm), it precisely identifies images and boasts an action detection error rate of less than 1% for activities like prolonged lying, bed exits and falling.
• Real-time alerts: Sent via a mobile app, real-time alerts immediately notify caregivers of any abnormal incidents such as fever, shortness of breath, or falls. This feature enables early detection of emergencies, reducing staff response time from one hour to just one minute. It significantly improves remote monitoring, emergency response rates and outcomes.
• Multi-sensory module: Its 60-GHz mmWave radar and thermal imaging sensors accurately detect body temperature, heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, and blood oxygen saturation, matching the accuracy of hospital equipment.
• AI-powered calibration: Artificial intelligence-based noise filtering and IoT capabilities work together to minimize interference based on the distance from the heat source, ambient temperature, and humidity, ensuring accurate body temperature detection and continuous motion analysis.
• Hospital-level precision: The High-Privacy AI Digital Caregiver stands out as the only care product on the market offering hospital-level accuracy, according to ITRI. In collaboration with Streamteck, ITRI tested 50 units at a Taipei City Hospital long-term care facility, where they successfully met National Early Warning Score (NEWS) standards. Unlike competitors with up to a 10% margin in respiration detection accuracy, the High-Privacy AI Digital Caregiver achieves accuracy of <±2 bpm for respiratory rate, <5% for heart rate, <±0.3 degrees Celsius for body temperature, <±2% for blood oxygen, and maintains a 90% accuracy rate for blood pressure trends. It also has an action detection error of less than 1% for activities such as prolonged standing, sitting, lying down, bed exits, and falling.

Many care facilities suffer from inadequate equipment and staffing. The High-Privacy AI Digital Caregiver allows care staff to monitor patients remotely. This reduces the need for frequent in-person visits and checks, alleviating the workload on health workers and helping to address workforce shortages.

The Intelligent Medical Assistant Solution (iMAS) integrates multiple lightweight and portable medical devices to offer a comprehensive telemedicine solution for patients with limited access to healthcare. Its intelligent medical imaging technology helps with diagnostic interpretation, enabling physicians to provide remote diagnoses. Physicians can monitor patient conditions in real time, helping to prevent treatment delays. During remote visits, physicians can easily carry the portable iMAS to deliver swift diagnosis and care. iMAS serves as a “homespital” solution that seamlessly combines home care and hospital services. This solution has been licensed to 36 vendors, including collaboration with Thailand’s largest telecom company.

Janus, an AI-powered cybersecurity solution, aims to transform medical device manufacturing. By integrating seamlessly into the process, it helps manufacturers meet rigorous global compliance standards (U.S. Food and Drug Administration), HIPAA, and NIST. Janus proactively protects devices from cyber threats, monitors M-IoT communications in real time, and detects suspicious activities. It simplifies network logs, updates firewalls dynamically, and streamlines compliance processes. This not only enhances product security but also boosts market competitiveness.

MedBobi is a smart medical assistant system that uses multimodal generative AI and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology to rapidly create medical reports from voice input and other data. It can understand up to 96 languages such as English, Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, Spanish, French, and Thai and can convert speech into text, reducing medical staff’s administrative work time by 75%. The system integrates voice input, pathological images and patient records to provide AI-powered personalized medical recommendations. Additionally, MedBobi features a professional dementia database, allowing users to better understand the disease through text-based Q&A and obtain personalized care plans.

iKNOBeads, the world’s first and only magnetic microbeads with controllable morphology, are designed to activate immune cells in the fight against diseases. Their uniform bead size ensures batch-to-batch reproducibility, while the bumpy body design maximizes cell interaction, enhancing activation efficiency and reducing the required bead quantity. This approach surpasses traditional activation materials and offers a more effective and economical feeder-free platform for generating high-quality and quantity immune cells for therapy. The adaptability of iKNOBeads technology, through surface modification, allows for a wide range of immunotherapy applications, promising potential breakthroughs in disease treatment that could revolutionize the field and bring hope to millions, according to ITRI.

ITRI is showcasing its smart medical technologies at booth 8430, North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, through Jan. 11.

The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is a technology R&D institution aiming to innovate a better future for society. Founded in 1973, ITRI has played a vital role in transforming Taiwan’s industries from labor-intensive into innovation-driven. To address market needs and global trends, it has launched its 2035 Technology Strategy and Roadmap that focuses on innovation development in Smart Living, Quality Health, Sustainable Environment, and Resilient Society.

Over the years, ITRI has been dedicated to incubating startups and spinoffs. In addition to its headquarters in Taiwan, ITRI has branch offices in the United States, Germany, Japan, and Thailand.