iSonea's AsthmaSense App

Medical technology company iSonea has raised $1.05 million in funding from Australian businessman Bruce Mathieson, who now owns about 15 percent of the company.

iSonea's CEO Michael Thomas explained that the funding would help the company build more of its medical devices' functionality into the smartphone platform: "iSonea is committed to developing innovative, non-invasive devices and mobile health applications to improve the management of chronic and costly respiratory disorders such as asthma and COPD. After the successful launch of our AsthmaSense mobile smartphone app this summer, the company is now focused on integrating our existing proprietary ARM sensors and analytical software with the AsthmaSense mobile smartphone app to develop an app based wheeze monitor known as AirSonea."

As MobiHealthNews reported earlier this year, while iSonea is currently a medical device company that makes its own hardware, it believes that at its core it is a smart algorithm and software company. It intends to become hardware agnostic and that smartphones will allow them to do that.

iSonea’s core offering today is a medical device called the Wheezometer, a point of care, handheld device that “analyzes 30 seconds of breath sounds using advanced signal processing algorithms to detect, quantify and objectively document the presence of wheeze and its extent,” according to iSonea’s website.

In February iSonea inked a deal with Qualcomm Life to bring the company's devices to Qualcomm's 2net platform for home health monitoring. The next month iSonea began recruiting for a pediatric asthma clinical trial that would make use of its Wheezometer device. Earlier this summer iSonea launched its first iPhone app, AsthmaSense, which offers journaling features, medication and testing alert reminders, emergency services contact information, and the ability to share data with caregivers and providers.

AirSonea, which Thomas announced for the first time in the Mathieson funding announcement, will be an Android or iPhone-based version of the Wheezometer that will likely make use of a peripheral device that attaches to the phone's microphone.

More on the funding announcement here.