Developers of apps for digital health have struggled to obtain Medicare coverage in the U.S. for their products, an impasse that seems unlikely to resolve anytime soon. Jason Bennett of CMS said on a Feb. 9 webinar that while the durable medical equipment (DME) benefit category seems like a natural fit for digital health products, there are some statutory and definitional roadblocks, including that digital health products might not be durable enough to qualify.

Know Labs Inc. has received approval from an independent institutional review board for an internal clinical study of its noninvasive glucose monitoring technology. The aim is to further validate the Bio-RFID (radio frequency identification) platform’s ability to accurately measure and detect changes in blood glucose levels. The study will be conducted at the Seattle-based company’s new research and development laboratory and include 200 subjects.

Based on the BCG Digital Ventures-Boston Consulting Group’s just issued 2022 Future of Digital Health: Health Care Innovation Predictions, the group expects 2022 to continue the trends seen over the last two years. Focus on “care anywhere” will support a continued increase in telemedicine use and, with it, advances in home-based testing, diagnostics and monitoring devices.

Glooko Inc. acquired Xbird GmbH to further build out its diabetes management platform by adding Xbird’s just-in-time artificial intelligence (JITAI) system to provide adaptive interventions that can enable better informed decision making in the moment. The company declined to provide details of the transaction.

Israel and U.S.-based Rsip Vision Ltd. has released a new supporting technology for intraoperative video analysis. The company says its offering provides real-time and accurate anatomical measurements in surgical videos. This supports a variety of clinical use cases, such as bariatric surgery and small bowel resection.

Stockholm-based Alex Therapeutics AB is joining forces with pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc. to roll out digital therapies to patients in Germany. The partnership will utilize Alex Therapeutics' Alex DTx platform for nicotine addiction in Germany. The platform combines cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy with artificial intelligence (AI) to create treatments for a wide range of psychiatric and somatic disorders.

A wearable biosensor developed by Scottish startup Pneumowave Ltd. has been tapped for a clinical trial investigating respiratory depression at King’s College London (KCL). Pneumowave’s respiratory monitoring platform will be used to collect breathing data from patients at risk of experiencing slow and shallow breathing as a side effect of opioid medication.

PARIS – Mikajaki SA reported the commercial launch of Eyelib, a robotic ophthalmic diagnostics platform. One year after obtaining CE marking, the Swiss-based med-tech is rolling out a wide-scale launch of its automatic ophthalmology examination system onto the European market.

Akili Interactive Inc. is the latest in a growing field of med-tech startups that are merging with special purpose acquisition companies as a backdoor path to an initial public offering. On Wednesday, the digital medicine company reported plans to combine with Social Capital Suvretta Holdings Corp. I in a deal valued at approximately $1 billion.

A year after announcing its intention to sell most of the assets of IBM Watson Health, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) finally reached an agreement with Francisco Partners. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the second half of 2022, were not disclosed. The gutting of Watson Health comes less than two months after IBM spun off its $19 billion managed technology services business, Kyndryl Holdings as a standalone company.