UCHealth CARE Innovation Partnership Drives Innovation in Wearable Technology

When healthcare professionals at the University of Colorado Anschutz Hospital lined up to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in December and January, some were wearing one of the newest approaches to wearable technology — a coin-sized device affixed with medical-grade adhesive to their upper left chests.

The low-cost medical grade device was the BioButtonTM, an FDA-cleared device that provides continuous vital sign monitoring of skin temperature, respiratory rate, and heart rate at rest. It was developed by BioIntelliSense, a clinical intelligence company based in Golden, Colo., and has been utilized as a scalable and cost-effective solution for health screening and COVID-19 symptom monitoring.

As vaccines became available to healthcare professionals starting in December 2020, our CARE Innovation Center, along with CU Innovations and UCHealth, partnered with BioIntelliSense. The goal was to explore the clinical applications of the BioButtonTM for monitoring vaccination as a foundational step in developing a scalable post-vaccine monitoring program that could be deployed broadly.