A group of researchers at Universiti Malaya (UM) has developed a COVID Symptom Monitoring System (CoSMoS) to help medical staff monitor patients suspected of COVID-19 infection.

The university, in a statement today, said the system has already been used at the Universiti Malaya Medical Center (PPUM) to monitor individuals suspected of COVID-19 and those in home quarantine, and is expected could also be used to monitor the medical team who are exposed to COVID-19 patients.

“Currently, a large number of medical staff monitor these patients by making routine calls to them or visiting them at home.

“Through the CoSMoS application, the monitoring process will be automated and patients can insert their daily symptoms into CoSMoS, it will be transmitted to the CoSMoS primary system at PPUM where doctors can access real-time information through dashboards," it said.

Through this system, it said, the medical staff would have only have to make calls to only 10 percent of patients in need of supervision, while the rest could be monitored through CoSMoS, thus allowing 80-90 per cent of medical staff to perform other tasks such as contact tracking and screening tests.

Infectious Diseases Specialist Datuk Prof Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman, who is also chairman of PPUM COVID-19 Working Group, said CoSMoS would change the way of managing patients suspected of COVID-19 who are quarantined at home.

“Currently, the healthcare system is under such high pressure with a medical officer having to spend 10-15 minutes daily to call patients and monitor patients for 14 days," she said.

Dr Adeeba, who is also the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, UM said that through the system, medical staff at PPUM would no longer have to make phone calls manually to patients.

“CoSMoS also leverages existing technology to make it accessible to the majority of the community," she added.

She said currently, the CoSMoS, developed in eight days through a collaboration with Malaysian researchers in various countries, is still undergoing pilot testing at PPUM and has received ethical approval from the university’s Medical Research Ethics Committee.

“All patients using CoSMoS have given their consent for their data to be used for clinical research and monitoring purposes," she added.

Meanwhile, Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, UM, Datin Prof Dr Sameem Abdul Kareem said CoSMoS is 100 percent produced by UM using public messaging engine, artificial intelligence and web technology by a team of young Malaysian computer scientists from the faculty.

-- BERNAMA