Empatica Announces EmbracePlus: NASA Medical Quality in a Down-to-Earth Smart Watch

BOSTON, Nov. 19, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — On November 19th, 2019, Empatica is announcing EmbracePlus, their new smart watch built in partnership with TRISH, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health.

NASA’s Human Research Program partners with external entities to develop new approaches that can help reduce the risk to humans on long exploration missions. One such entity is TRISH, who chose Empatica to develop EmbracePlus to be the first wearable to monitor the health of the astronaut crew that will board the first manned mission to Mars.

50 years ago, on November 19th, 1969, Apollo 12 made a precision landing on the surface of the moon. It was the first successful mission after Apollo 11, achieving its challenge to land a short distance from the Surveyor III spacecraft, which had previously been sent to explore the moon’s surface. The highly accurate targeting and success of the mission opened the way for unprecedented discoveries.

A new Embrace made for space, to empower discoveries

EmbracePlus has been designed from the ground-up as a space-ready device suitable for health monitoring during deep space missions. EmbracePlus can support longitudinal diagnostics, giving astronauts actionable insights into their health without the need of wearing invasive instrumentation.

Empatica was chosen because of its track record and success in creating the first smart watch used in neurology to detect seizures, the Embrace2, which has received FDA clearance for both its hardware sensors and its software alerting algorithm. The brand new EmbracePlus will provide the highest quality measures for long-term medical sensing while functioning reliably and robustly, despite harsh and challenging environments. No matter whether a person is experiencing severe forces from space travel or a hard fall from a seizure or stroke, EmbracePlus is designed to operate continuously and accurately. The device also offers powerful on-board advanced processing that can run custom AI algorithms to provide support to the wearer.

Empatica enables the data for personalized digital health

Empatica has always had the advantage of building and developing everything in-house, from algorithms and software to hardware, thus providing reliable, holistic solutions to far-reaching medical and research problems. Their products today are widely used in clinical studies in Neurology and Psychology/Psychiatry. Neurological disorders are the largest cause of disability worldwide and currently affect one in six of the world’s population. Depression is already the leading cause of years lived with disability in the USA and is on track globally to exceed cancer, accidents, and stroke in predicted lives lost and years lived with disability by the year 2030.

The new capabilities of EmbracePlus can enable never-before-seen research breakthroughs:

• A beautiful design with an e-ink face, capable of giving reminders and prompting the wearer with questions, facilitating engagement
• A powerful microcontroller unit (MCU), for running advanced AI algorithms
• A comfortable, swappable and customizable strap, which runs circuitry inside to power electrodes
• Customizable sensor data sampling
• Wireless communications and fast data streaming using Bluetooth 5
• Custom LED and photodiode configuration detects high-quality heart rate and heart rate variability
• Custom electrodermal activity sensing provides continuous changes in autonomic stress
• A portal with secure access to raw data and tools to ease the management of large studies
• On-wrist charging with a revolutionary new patent-pending sleek pod, ensuring the device never needs to be taken off unless the wearer wants to
• Waterproof package

EmbracePlus is not limited to enabling great new discoveries on Earth; it is designed to bring precision monitoring and support to astronauts when, boldly, they go where no human has gone before.

It will ship to its first clients in the summer of 2020.

About Empatica

Empatica, Inc. is an MIT spin-off, with offices in Boston, Milan, and South Korea. Five years ago on November 19, 2014, Empatica launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to create the first medical smart watch to detect seizures, Embrace. Today, Embrace is sold both to individuals for seizure alerts and to researchers who use its data on sleep, activity, stress, and seizures to develop improved treatments for people with different kinds of medical needs. Empatica also sells its E4 band to researchers for clinical studies. All E4 purchases before the end of 2019 will be upgraded to EmbracePlus for free.

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SOURCE Empatica