This Digital Health News industry roundup includes an IT award for the Department of Health and Social Care and Netcompany for the NHS Covid Pass, accreditation for an AI device and a virtual falls service keeping care home residents out of hospital. Digital health and AI company Empatica has received clearance of its Empatica Health Monitoring Platform by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The platform has been cleared for continuous data collection to monitor blood oxygen saturation during rest, peripheral skin temperature, activity associated with movement during sleep and electrodermal activity. Each digital biomarker is based on trained algorithms that analyse sensor data in one-minute intervals. Dr. Marisa Cruz, chief medical officer of Empatica, said: "This clearance represents a significant step forward for our scientific community. Patients, healthcare providers, and researchers deserve digital health products that are accurate, validated in diverse populations, and intuitive to use. "We are proud to have built a solution that accomplishes these goals, offering a high-quality and reliable digital health tool to scientists working to improve patient outcomes through research and clinical care." The company has also announced the closing of its Series B financing. The investment was led by Sanofi Venture and RA Capital Management with participation by Black Opal Ventures. Empatica intends to use the financing to expand its suite of digital biomarkers for use in both patient care and in clinical trials as digital endpoints. Cris De Luca, partner at Sanofi Ventures and newly-appointed board member at Empatica, said: "By gaining higher resolution into disease symptomology through novel digital measures and digital biomarkers in clinical and real-world settings, Empatica is unlocking the possibilities of early disease detection, enhanced treatment decisions, and improving quality of life for patients around the world." International IT services company, Netcompany, alongside the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) have won the Emerging Technology of the Year award in the Technology Excellence category of the 2022 UK IT Industry Awards. The two companies were recognised for their work on the NHS Covid Pass, which also saw them receive a highly commended in the Best Healthcare IT Project of the Year 2022. The win reflects the vital role that the NHS Covid Pass has played in the safe reopening of the country. It allows users to shared their Covid-19 status or vaccination status when travelling internationally. Richard Davies, UK country managing partner at Netcompany, said: "This award recognises our talented teams, expertise, and dedication towards creating technology solutions that help to improve the everyday lives of citizens.

Embrace by Empatica is a smart watch for epilepsy management to identify convulsive seizures and send alerts to caregivers. Empatica, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, received FDA clearance for a wristworn device that uses machine learning to alert people with epilepsy and their caregivers of a convulsive seizure and track their duration and frequency. Epilepsy affects a least 2.2 million people, according to data from the Epilepsy Foundation. Empatica's Emrace device assesses multiple indicators of a seizure, including electrodermal activity, a signal associated with fight or flight response that's used by stress researchers to quantify physiological changes related to sympathetic nervous system activity, the company statement noted. In a clinical trial of the device, 135 patients across multiple sites resided at epilepsy monitoring units with continuous monitoring with video-EEG and simultaneously wore an Empatica device.