This morning Healthy.io, the company best-known for its smartphone-based urinalysis system, announced its plans to launch a new product for wound management and tracking.
The new tool, which was registered with the FDA in December, employs a smartphone app and two calibration stickers.
Unlike Healthy.io’s home urinalysis tool, which is marketed directly to consumers, this system is deisgned to be used by nurses in a clinical setting.
Nurses place the calibration stickers around the area of the wound and then scan the wound area with the smartphone. The technology can give a wound measurement and build a 3D image. Nurses can also enter the administered treatment plan and information about the type of wound, pain level, odor and other factors into the app. The technology has a CE mark and is currently used at a medical center in the UK.
WHY IT MATTERS
The company is pitching this technology as a way to reduce nurses’ workload burden and increase accuracy in wound measurement.
"Nurses, already overextended, are on the front line of wound care and are the real heroes but the tools they are using today haven't changed in decades. We believe this is the heart of the problem and why we have created a solution that will help them accurately track wound progress over time," Yonatan Adiri, founder and CEO of Healthy.io, said in a statement. "Our expertise, robust partnerships and track record in clinical grade image and color recognition position us to make a significant impact on this market."
THE LARGER TREND
This project has been in the works for a well over a year. During a July 2018 interview Adiri discussed the prospect of a wound care tool with MobiHealthNews. In particular he pointed out that the status quo was using a large paper ruler.
“Our framing for this vision or domain is that measuring of the chronic wound should change from rulers to smartphones,” he said during the 2018 interview. “If we are successful in doing that, then the impact from a patient journey, from a healthcare system’s capability to curb these inflating costs, would be massive. In this field we don’t believe in direct-to-consumer products in the vision of the future of the short- to mid-term, we basically want to allow our nurses to become super nurses through allowing for their smartphone cameras to assist them in the process, and also make the 10-minute process, which is non-repeatable, to a three-to-five-second process that is fully repeatable.”
Healthy.io landed FDA clearance for its home-based urinalysis kit Dip.io in July of 2018. More recently, the company announced another clearance intended to support diagnosis of chronic kidney diseases.
The company also been raising a good deal of money in the past few years. In September the company completed a $60 million Series C raise.
When it comes to measuring wound care Healthy.io isn’t the only company working on the technology. Swift Medical, Tissue Analytics are also building systems that replace that inaccurate manual measurement with computer measurements.
