An Evaluation of Biometric Monitoring Technologies for Vital Signs in the Era of COVID-19

What Clinicians Need to Know Before Trusting Vital Signs Collected at Home

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a shift already underway in healthcare: more vital sign data is now collected in patients’ homes using biometric monitoring technologies (BioMeTs) rather than in a clinic. But that shift created a knowledge gap, many healthcare providers have limited prior experience with BioMeTs and may be unfamiliar with the range of available devices, their data collection protocols, and the context needed to interpret the values they produce. A review published in Clinical and Translational Science, co-authored by researchers from Elektra Labs, the Digital Medicine Society, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Koneksa Health, sets out to close that gap.

What the Review Covers

• Vital signs in scope: The review provides an overview of BioMeTs available for collecting five core vital signs: temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, and respiratory rate.
• Engineering and design considerations: The authors highlight BioMeT engineering solutions, form factors, and body placements, along with the factors that can influence measurement accuracy when vital signs are captured at home rather than in a controlled clinical setting.
• Strengths and limitations of continuous monitoring: The review weighs the benefits of continuous, remote vital sign monitoring against its practical limitations, giving readers a balanced view rather than a purely promotional one.
• The validation gap: The authors note that many BioMeT types lack well-established validation protocols, making it difficult to gather validation information for every device on the market. Blood pressure stands out as the only vital sign with internationally accepted validation protocols and routine independent validation studies; other vital signs have no widely agreed-upon equivalent.
• Practical guidance for adoption: The paper offers considerations for remote data collection and points readers toward available sources of validation information, intended to guide BioMeT selection during COVID-19 and in the years beyond it.

The Broader Implication for Remote Monitoring Programs

This review makes a point that’s easy to overlook amid the rapid adoption of remote monitoring: not all BioMeTs are held to the same validation standard, and knowing which vital signs have robust validation protocols and which don’t  is essential to making sound clinical or trial decisions from remote data. Blood pressure’s well-established validation infrastructure stands in contrast to less standardized areas like respiratory rate, where users must be more cautious about data quality and context.

This is the same discernment Koneksa Health applies when selecting and validating biometric technologies for sponsors, treating each vital sign and each device on its own evidentiary merits, rather than assuming remote data collection is inherently equivalent across the board.

Reference: Manta C, Jain SS, Coravos A, Mendelsohn D, Izmailova ES. An Evaluation of Biometric Monitoring Technologies for Vital Signs in the Era of COVID-19. Clin Transl Sci. 2020;13(6):1034-1044. doi:10.1111/cts.12874. PMID: 32866314.