Tivic Health Systems, maker of a commercial sinus pain relief device, announced yesterday that it has raised $8 million in seed funding. Sand Hill Angels, Astia Angels, Golden Seeds, HBS Angels, Sierra Angels, Lateral Capital, Skylight Investments, an unnamed physician network and individual investors each backed the company through a series of smaller investments, the most recent of which the...
The FDA has granted 510(k) clearance to an over-the-counter handheld electronic device for treating hay fever sinus pains, according to an announcement from its manufacturer.
Tivic Health Systems’ ClearUP Sinus Pain Relief device is non-invasive and does not rely on a pharmacological component. Instead, the single-button device is run along the skin of the user's cheek, nose and brow, where it...
PlushCare, a direct-to-consumer telemedicine service that originally focused on acute and urgent care, has partnered with Thermo Fisher Scientific to add allergy testing to its offerings. PlushCare users will have access to Thermo Fisher's ImmunoCAP Specific IgE blood test, which can detect a number of allergies without needing to subject a patient to the traditional skin prick test.
"It’s a...
Researchers at Harvard Medical School have built a point-of-use food allergen detector that fits onto a keychain and can conducts tests in under ten minutes.
The prototype device costs less than $40 to produce, and in restaurant settings could detect major antigens at sensitivities well below the regulatory limit. While the sensitivity and ease of the integrated exogenous antigen testing (iEAT)...
Sanofi Consumer Healthcare, a division of the global pharmaceutical company, used wearable devices in a "social experiment" that forms part of the marketing efforts for Xyzal, its 24-hour allergy medication that recently became available over the counter. The company used wearables to track the sleep and activity of allergy sufferers in a small non-scientific test in order to demonstrate ways in...
A new smartphone-connected device for measuring the nutritional content of food has raised $2.2 million on Kickstarter, on top of $4 million to $5 million in funding from venture capitalists including Khosla Ventures, according to TechCrunch. SCiO is a tiny spectrometer that promises to send information about food, nutrition, and medication to a user's smartphone via Bluetooth Low Energy.
Tel...
Fitbit has announced a voluntary recall of the Fitbit Force after a number of users complained of somewhat mysterious bouts of skin irritation, usually occurring a number of weeks after they began wearing the tracker.
"Recently, some Force users have reported skin irritation," Fitbit CEO James Park said in an open letter to customers. "While only 1.7 percent of Force users have reported any type...
Here's an interesting twist for a smartphone application offering from a big brand: AccuWeather announced today the release of an iPhone application called WeatherMD, which helps users predict when symptoms their various medical conditions might be at their worst during the day because of weather. The app targets users with arthritis, asthma, migraines, allergies and sinus problems. WeatherMD,...
