Naperville, Illinois-based PhysIQ raised $4.6 million in a round led by LionBird for its digital health analytics platform. This brings the company's total funding to $5.6 million.
"What we're bringing to market is a personalized analytics approach to monitoring physiology," PhysIQ CEO Gary Conkright told MobiHealthNews. "Rather than comparing physiological measurements to group population norms, we build a personalized model for each patient so that we can compare you to you instead of comparing you to what is normal for a population. That allows us to see exacerbations earlier than other approaches. It also allows us to develop an index for change -- so we boil all of this information down into an index that allows clinicians or the consumer to easily see, intuitively see, what has changed from the past."
The company is in the process of completing a series of clinical studies. One study, with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Salt Lake City has been completed, but two others at the University of Chicago Medical Center are still ongoing. All trials have around 20 congestive heart failure patients participating.
In the trial with the VA, PhysIQ provided patients with its own wearable devices to track heart rate. Data from this device was sent to a smartphone app and from there it was exported to a cloud program for analysis. PhysIQ is also in the process of obtaining FDA clearance for the personalized analytics platform.
PhysIQ is building its platform for any organization that is aggregating biometrics from different devices. The company is also a partner in Samsung's recently announced new platform, called Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions, or SAMI, which collects data from various devices. PhysIQ was referred to as the "brain" that could be used to make sense of the data from SAMI. Although PhysIQ is an early launch partner for Samsung, Conkright said the company is still open to working with other companies that have created similar platforms.
"There's both the regulated healthcare market as well as the the unregulated health and fitness market," Conkright said. "So in the health and fitness market, there are companies that are putting together data, like Samsung. But you know Apple and Google are all also developing similar products. That's in the health and fitness space. And in regulated healthcare space, anyone who is in the remote patient monitoring business and has biometric data from a patient from one or more wearables, they could use our analytics platform to process the data that they collect."
In the health, fitness, and OEM market, PhysIQ is considering a technology licensing or royalty-based business model, but in the healthcare market, the company is leaning toward a monthly subscription service for providers.
PhysIQ aims to commercially launch in the first half of 2015.
