Digital health is on the brain of some emerging entrepreneurs this year. Last week the Thiel Foundation announced its latest winners of its entrepreneurial technology fellowship, and among them were three candidates with a digital health focus.

“Healthcare is a difficult industry for young founders to break into — it's fractured and heavily regulated,” Allyson Dias, director of the Thiel Fellowship, wrote in an email to MobiHealthNews. “When we review applications for the Fellowship program, we focus on the individual, more so than their company or project. We were impressed with all of the candidates this year, and were particularly moved by those wanting to solve big problems in healthcare — a lot of them were inspired by personal stories of their own.”

The fellowship targets entrepreneurs ages 22 and younger. Fellows receive $100,000 over the course of the two-year program. They also receive support and access to networks of investors, partners, and prospective customers. 

The foundation was created in 2011 by tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel. This new group of fellows will be the eighth Thiel cohort, bringing the total number of past and present fellows to 180. 

The program is designed as a sort of alternative to formal education — or as the foundation puts it, a program for “young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” The fellows can be in school when they apply for the program, but if accepted are required to drop out. 

This current cohort isn’t the first to include fellows with the digital health focus. Dias noted that past fellows have included Harry Gandhi of Medella Health, Dean Travers of Luminopia, Ivonna Dumanyan of Fathom.ai, and Laura Deming of The Longevity Fund.

The new entrepreneurs are entering the digital health space while it is very hot. In fact, Rock Health reported that digital health companies scored a record $1.62 billion in the first quarter of 2018.

“This year we were pleased to see a number of fantastic applicants dedicated to fixing healthcare using digital health,” Dias wrote. “We've been supporting entrepreneurs in this space since the Fellowship began.”

In addition to the digitally focused health companies, there are also several fellows looking at wearables that are adjacent to the space, like an adhesive wearable for chronic care called EspressionMed by fellow Meghan Sharkus. 

Here is a closer look at the fellows focusing on digital health:

Erin Smith is working on an artificial intelligence tool to help diagnose and monitor Parkinson’s disease and other commonly misidentified neurological disorders. Her product, called FacePrint, will use video and early-stage facial muscle indicators.

“As I talked to caretakers and clinicians, they reported similar observations in their loved ones years before diagnosis,” Smith wrote in an email to MobiHealthNews. “I wondered if facial expressions could monitor changes in the brain like Parkinson’s and objectively detect its onset. As I began working one-on-one with patients and launched national studies, I was inspired by the patients’ stories and resilience. Developing FacePrint became my way to say thank you to the patients who have given me so much in terms of their friendship and wisdom.”

She plans to use the funding to further develop the product and conduct longitudinal studies to track patients over time. 

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Julian Rios is aiming to develop the first noninvasive and accessible wearable that will detect breast cancer risk. He said his product, called the EVA, will be particularly useful for women with high breast density, a factor that can make it harder for doctors to tell the difference between healthy breast tissue and abnormal masses. 

Rios’s connection to the technology he is developing is personal. 

“My mother is a two-time breast cancer survivor,” Riso wrote in an email to MobiHealthNews. “After the second diagnosis, I resolved to find a better screening technique than the self-examination.”

Rios plans to use the funding to potentially help invest in clinical protocols in order to move the device through the FDA faster. In five years he hopes that his device is the gold standard for detecting breast cancer. 

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Andre Bertram is working on a home ECG monitor called HelpWear. The goal is for the product to monitor and detect any cardiac abnormalities and be able to generate a response system. 

Like Rios, Bertram cited a real-world experience as inspiration for his interest in the space. 

“One day when Frank Nguyen, HelpWear’s founding CTO, got home from school he found his mother at the bottom of the stairs with a broken leg,” Bertram wrote in an email to MobiHealthNews. “When they got to the emergency room, they determined that she had not simply slipped and fell, but had instead had a cardiac event at the top of the stairs, but a lack of data from the event occurrence meant she could never be treated appropriately. Frank was my good friend throughout high school, and we knew we could build technology to help.”

He plans to use the funding to speed up the process of getting the technology to market. The idea is to have clinical validation for the product completed this year. In the future, Bertram said he would like to see the product FDA cleared and avilable across the US and Canadian markets, as well as in China and South East Asia.