KINSA INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: X224-OCSO1

Description

Kinsa is an early warning system for spreading illness that provides real-time, geographically-precise situational awareness of population health dynamics surrounding a military installation, enabling decision makers to understand whether personnel are at increased risk of illness; which illness are going around and how many people are likely to get sick in the coming weeks or month from flu, COVID or other infectious illnesses. This information can advise key actions such as operations timing and enhanced quarantining to protect personnel ahead of critical military activities.  For enterprise clients, Kinsa has developed models that forecast flu, COVID cases and other outbreaks, projecting  demand for products such as medicine, disinfectant, and PPE. A top-3 pharmacy chain has used Kinsa Insights to improve demand forecasts by 20% – a substantial improvement. Kinsa’s early warning and forecasting system detected the emergence of Covid in early 2020, and identified the first wave 20 days in advance. Even during the Omicron wave, when there was ample testing, Kinsa still identified the peak on a location-specific basis, 8-11 days before official case counts reflected this. From emerging epidemics to seasonal flu, spreading illness threatens the mission readiness of our Armed Forces. Real-time, geographically-precise situational awareness of disease levels, occurring both within the general public and specific military populations, can help the USAF detect and respond to emerging outbreaks, before force readiness degrades.  Because military families stationed on base often interact with the surrounding community as they go to work or school, rising community illness poses risks to military personnel. However, current systems have no way of assessing how community illness levels may impact risk to military personnel. Additionally, relying solely on public health data for this purpose is ineffective because that data is delayed and often inconsistently reported. By the time case counts are recognized, there has already been substantial community spread.  Kinsa maps illness hotspots, with geographic granularity and demographics specificity, in order to identify populations driving outbreaks and support an effective response, and can integrate this data into USAF systems and develop customized, syndrome-based alerts to identify risks and preserve readiness. Kinsa leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to synthesize public health data and proprietary signals from its national network of smart thermometers and medical guidance apps. This allows us to capture critical, unique data sets: real-time symptom incidence (including mild cases), symptom progression, and transmission events, and provide leaders with enough lead time to take action to preserve force readiness.