The technology behind Vital Intelligence was originally designed to help the world’s smallest patients: premature infants in neonatal intensive care units in the developing world. In countries without robust healthcare infrastructure or access to ample medical equipment, NICU administrators are often left to use a single heart rate sensor to monitor multiple infants.

For a normal set of patients, sharing a heart rate sensor might not be an issue. But for preterm infants fighting to stay alive, these sensors are life-or-death. Even when there are enough sensors to go around, a premature infant’s fragile skin is often damaged by the sensors.

Vital Intelligence’s core technology helped create a non-contact vitals monitoring system for NICU patients and other clinical environments so that the world’s most vulnerable patients can be monitored more easily and reliably.

Knowing this technology had more ways to help protect people around the world, Draganfly – the world’s most trusted drone hardware and software company – acquired Vital Intelligence during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They got to work spinning out a product that could monitor large groups of people from afar to detect symptoms and prevent the spread of infectious diseases, and later expanded the product suite that’s available today.