BioT Builds Cloud-Native Medical Devices on AWS

Blog is guest authored by Guy Vinograd, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at BioT.

With a vision to make world-class medical care accessible to patients wherever they are, Israeli startup BioT provides a platform for building cloud-powered medical devices. Its innovative technology helps connect Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices to the cloud. This allows secure, seamless transmission of health data—such as a patient’s vital signs—back to clinicians and manufacturer stakeholders. The result? A faster, safer, and more effective continuum of care between hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices, and patients’ homes.

Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the platform offers comprehensive and validated self-service developer modules, covering remote care, business operations, device operations, and post-market surveillance. Set-up is easy through a generic data modeler and extendable with an algorithm-operations system. BioT’s customers, thus, can build connected systems in a single day, saving up to 80 percent of time and cost to market.

Securing Patient Data in the Cloud

The medical-device landscape is changing radically. Home-based care is introducing additional considerations around total cost of ownership, human-device interface complexity, and privacy. With BioT’s technology, dozens of manufacturers—from big enterprises to startups—can deliver connected care to people’s homes, across a wide range of clinical domains. “We’ve designed BioT for this new exciting generation. Our platform is helping medical device companies build solutions that are more compact, affordable, and easier to use for patients,” says Guy Vinograd, cofounder and chief technology officer at BioT.

The secure solution meets the compliance regulations from governing bodies across the globe, with AWS’ Shared Responsibility Model ensuring the integrity of the underlying infrastructure. BioT uses AWS Trusted Advisor, a service that provides recommendations to help organizations follow AWS best practices, reduce costs, improve performance, and enhance security. This helps medical-device organizations accelerate their regulatory process by up to 6 months. In addition, leveraging AWS’ global infrastructure, BioT can deploy its solution across the United States, the European Union, and China. “AWS facilitates compliance with dozens of regulations and standards in our customers’ countries and regions, which is crucial for our success and our customers’ success,” says Vinograd.

Guidelines from the US Foods and Drug Administration and HIPAA in the United States, to the ISO 62304 and the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU, can change often. This requires BioT to pay close attention to potential changes and adjust quickly. “Maintaining a medical-grade product is resource intensive because we are exchanging sensitive medical data over a cloud solution,” says Vinograd. “Using AWS, we can implement revised algorithms around data processing and cybersecurity in the cloud instead of developing this functionality in the devices. The pace of innovation at AWS is critical to the success of BioT.”

Connecting Cloud-Native Medical Devices

BioT began using AWS right from its inception in 2018. “As a startup, we needed an affordable solution. We chose AWS because it is by far the most comprehensive cloud and has a firm commitment to support IoT workloads. Without AWS, we couldn’t have started the company,” says Vinograd.

The company has since grown on AWS. Operating on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), the team can define and launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network. To help keep data moving quickly and securely, BioT uses AWS IoT Core, which lets users connect billions of IoT devices and route trillions of messages to AWS services without managing infrastructure. With AWS IoT Core, BioT can move critical data, such as updates and remote commands, with ultra-low latency and near-real-time. “Doctors get the information in less than 1 second, allowing true remote patient monitoring,” says Vinograd.

To implement its container microservices on the backend, BioT uses AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets users focus on building applications without managing servers. For more complex issues like firmware updates, consent management, or other customizations, there’s an algorithm-operations system, powered by AWS Lambda. This helps BioT’s customers to plug in and deploy their own algorithms, and extend the platform’s workflows for their own use. BioT further bolsters its security using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to create and control keys used to encrypt or digitally sign data, while AWS WAF helps protect web applications from common exploits.

BioT’s flexible solution helps address the varying requirements across clinical domains, settings, and use cases (like monitoring, diagnostics, therapeutics). A Generic Data Modeler ingests a range of data (telemetry, waveforms, imagery, and more) and transforms it for downstream analysis, allowing users to set up the system in just an hour. Amazon Timestream, a fast, scalable, and serverless time-series database, makes it easy for users to store and analyze trillions of data points per day, giving users more time to focus on innovating on the device itself.

Innovating for Compliance with Machine Learning

BioT was recently accepted into the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, a co-sell program for organizations that provide software solutions that run on or work alongside AWS. The program supports driving new business and accelerating sales cycles by connecting participating independent software vendors to the AWS Sales organization.

BioT plans to expand its reach into device data streaming in the future, furthering the sophistication of its solution. “A future goal is to use machine learning and big data to compress biomarker and waveform streams, thus enabling low latency and new uses for MQTT,” closes Vinograd.

Guy Vinograd, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of BioT, is a researcher of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), focusing on medical device cloudification, connected care, and digital health applications. Guy draws on his expertise as a pioneer in architecting scalable cloud SaaS platforms for connected devices for over 20 years. As an IoMT Key Opinion Leader Guy is a popular speaker and the organizer of the meetup group Smart IoMT Product Experts of Israel. Guy has co-founded BioT, which provides MedTech companies with a validated platform for developing, evolving, and executing cloud-powered medical devices far more efficiently than in any other way.