The U.S. Department of the Army intends to award a $80,973 sole-source contract to Fitbit, under which the agency's Medical Research and Materiel Command Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center will have access to 540 of the company's activity trackers.
Under the contract, the newly established Virtual Medical Centers at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and Walter Reed National Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., will use the activity trackers to conduct a remote home monitoring pilot. The activity trackers will deliver data to the agency's Mobile Health Care Environment system, from which care providers can view the information on a centralized dashboard of home-based activity metrics.
"Tracking routine and exercise based activity and sleep is one of the key components for case managers and members of the [Virtual Medical Centers] staff to conduct remote home monitoring for patients who are a high risk for hospitalization if their health statuses are not monitoring between clinical encounters," the agency's notice of intent to sole-source reads.
Fitbit's Charge 2 activity trackers are the only devices shown to interoperate with the MHCE system in clinical trials, according to the army's notice.