Photo credit: Pixabay.
Say you work outside your hometown. Throughout the day, your mind drifts back to your family. Your father has just been diagnosed with diabetes and is learning to manage it. Your mother is trying to help him, but she’s learning about the disease herself. You have an infant at home and frequently talk on the phone with your sister, who is expecting a child herself. Meanwhile, you and your spouse have made a New Year’s resolution to get in shape but can’t always find time to work out together.
If Bangalore-based health monitoring startup Medaino Healthcare gets its way, you can address all of those things with a couple of swipes through your smartphone, through which you can find out how everyone’s doing. The startup, part of TLabs’ eighth class just kicked off its Indiegogo campaign to fund its device H.O.M.E. (Hands On Monitoring Equipment).
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The device, which looks like a slightly-bigger Playstation 2 controller, can non-invasively measure ECG (electrocardiogram, the rhythm of a heartbeat), blood pressure, respiratory rate (the number of breaths in a minute, air quality, hemoglobin (oxygen in the blood), blood oximetry, and heart rate. Up to eight people’s vitals can then be sent to one smartphone, where that person can keep track of the numbers and get a heads up if something goes wrong. The device maintains a data trail, analyzes the information, and makes suggestions for health goals or warns a doctor’s care is needed. Users get routine reports with insights into their daily lives.
For 200 people who claim the perk in the crowdfunding campaign, a single H.O.M.E. device can cost as little as US$109, with an estimated arrival in April this year.
H.O.M.E. routinely uploads data to the cloud via wifi or data. If neither of those are available, it can hold onto information for up to 30 days and will upload it as soon as connectivity is available.
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The power of touch
H.O.M.E. takes its readings noninvasively, powered by touch. To get a reading, users place their thumbs on the two grooves on the front. In 10 seconds, the device collects and analyzes the data and will display it on the device. If wifi or data is available, it will send the information to the cloud and app. The water resistant gadget reads with different accuracies depending on what’s being measured. Readings like temperature are 100 percent accurate, while heart rate, respiratory rate, and hemoglobin readings are 98 percent accurate. Blood pressure readings are 90 percent accurate.
Medaino co-founders Shubham Agarwal and Nitish Hooda were inspired to create the health monitoring company in 2014. The company began as a school project. The co-founders had a friend in school with high blood pressure, who ended up having a brain hemorrhage – brain bleeding.
“We thought of making something like this so that users could track their body vitals on a regular basis,” Shaubam tells Tech in Asia. While helpful for those with chronic diseases – 8.7 percent of adults between ages 20 and 79 have diabetes in India – it was also designed with other uses in mind, like tracking fitness or keeping an eye on parents’ health from afar.
Keeping a health record also gives doctors more information about conditions during visits. India is in the middle of a doctor shortage, so getting health information without seeing a physician is even more valuable.
Many birds, one stone
Medaino’s team. Photo credit: Medaino.
H.O.M.E. covers issues already addressed by a number of startups. Uber Diagnostics, Tricog, and iMMi Life work on collecting ECGs and getting that information to a doctor that can read them, tasks that can detect an oncoming heart attack and possibly save lives. Companies like Medinfi help children vet physicians for their aging parents, while Diabeto helps individuals with diabetes track and manage their illness with the help of coaches.
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H.O.M.E. combines those types of services into one. Medaino is also working on a continuous monitoring device slated to come out in around six months, after the production of H.O.M.E. is completed.
H.O.M.E.’s Indiegogo funding goal is US$50,000, which will pay for the product’s manufacturing in Italy. Medaino has so far raised US$1,754 from 26 backers, with a month left to raise.
Medaino’s two-member team has now grown to 20. The startup has been funded by Times Internet, which allowed it to produce its finalized prototype in August of last year.
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