GoodParents, makers of the Kiddo health wearable for children aged 4 to 10, has raised $2 million in seed capital. The round was led by partners at Jungle Ventures. Fireside Ventures, Bio Sensors International, Gaja Ventures, and a number of angel investors also contributed.
GoodParents is working on creating a wearable for kids that will be fun to wear but also provide parents with realtime data on a child’s health and wellbeing.
“The pieces are very simple,” CEO Jaganath “CJ” Swamy told MobiHealthNews. “Parents are very worried about the health and wellness of their children, but today parents have no way of understanding what’s happening to their child.”
The Kiddo wearable, which is actually three different devices tailored for 4-to-6-year-olds, 6-to-8-year-olds, and 8-to-10-year-olds respectively, tracks temperature, perspiration, heart rate, fat percentage and muscle mass, and motion. All that information is relayed to a dashboard that show’s a child’s health, activity, sleep, and emotional wellbeing as scores calculated for the parents’ benefit. The platform also allows for manual logging of things like food.
“We have a health and wellness device,” Swamy said. “Gamification is there to engage the kid, but the central use case is around health and stress management. Can the parent react faster to a health crisis? Our central use case is about health and wellness and there is no device that has done health and wellness for young kids out there. It’s really different from what other wearables have done.”
The gamification takes a few different forms, Swamy said. The wearables can be linked to allow kids to play gesture-based games together, from making real sounds with pantomimed musical instruments to a rock-paper-scissors game. Kids can also get points for completing health goals set by their parents, and trade those points in for real and virtual rewards.
The 1-year-old company has an impressive team which includes Swamy, a serial entrepreneur; Chief of Product Jean Rintoul, who was an early employee at Basis Science; and CTO Bo Vargas, former CTO of blood pressure sensing startup Quanttus. The company has partnered with Samsung and key advisers at the Foods for Health Institute based at University of California Davis in the development of the product.
They plan to offer the device direct-to-consumer, starting with a Kickstarter in January 2017, as well as via health plans and employers. The company has already locked down a collaboration with a top-10 health insurer and another B2B customer, Swamy said.
Because it looks beyond activity to sleep and stress, Kiddo is broader in scope than some previous kids’ activity trackers like Sqord, GeoPalz, and Zamzee, which was acquired by WellTok last year.
