HALO Telemonitoring

HALO — human attended live observation — began as a quality-improvement project on a lung-transplant unit at UHN's Toronto General Hospital, not as a company. Patients waiting for lungs live on high-flow oxygen, and a mask that slips during sleep or a phone call can put them into respiratory arrest within seconds. Alarms missed it and one-to-one sitters were expensive and, patients said, unpleasant. Zubrinic's first prototype was chopped-down IV poles with Amazon speakers, microphones and cameras; a single conditional yes funded the pilot. The second night on her home unit, a test patient removed his mask, technicians escalated, nurses arrived, and the event was prevented — which is when the department bought in. The company now monitors from a head office in the MaRS building over VPN links into hospital networks, and hospitals extend it to fall and line-pulling risk. Health Canada told the team the system is not a medical device, which spared it that approval path.