Cardiac health-monitoring smart toilet seat maker Casana (formerly Heart Health Intelligence) has raised $14 million in a Series A funding round led by General Catalyst and the Outsiders Fund. Also participating was Bemis Manufacturing Company, a toilet seat manufacturer that led the startup's $2.2 million round last April.
In addition to the fundraise, Casana announced that Austin McChord, the...
“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom” is an apt mantra for the countless digital health companies and device makers seeking to track health or wellness. Sensors worn on the wrist, housed in a phone or even adhered to the body are continuously collecting biomarkers that concerned wearers can reference when investigating their poor sleep or reviewing their weekly activity.
And while some of...
In an effort to tackle in-home cardiac arrest, University of Washington researchers have devised a novel contactless system that uses smartphones or voice-based personal assistants to identify telltale breathing patterns that accompany an attack.
The proof-of-concept strategy, described in an NPJ Digital Medicine paper published this morning, involved a supervised machine learning model called a...
Boston-based Sonde Health, a recent spin-out of PureTech Health, has licensed a health-focused voice scanning technology from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories.
The technology, developed by Thomas Quatieri, detects a range of mental health conditions from biomarkers in a person’s voice. In pilot studies, it has shown promise in measuring symptoms of depression, mild traumatic brain injury, concussion,...
EarlySense, an Israeli company which makes a passive and contactless bedside monitor that continuously measures respiration rate, heart rate, and motion, has raised $20 million, with $10 million constituting a strategic investment from Samsung. Welch Allyn, which licenses EarlySense's sensor, also contributed, as did other existing investors Pitango Venture Capital, JK&B, Proseed and Noaber...
Ginger.io, a health startup focused on passive data collection through smartphones, announced a number of high profile clinical pilots that have been quietly employing its technology. Ginger.io is now working with UC San Francisco, Partners HealthCare (Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and McLean Hospital), Duke University, UC Davis and University of Nebraska Medical...
Medical device maker HealthSense raised $10 million in equity, debt, and securities in a round led by Mansa Capital with additional investment from existing investors Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and Radius Ventures. Another existing investor that wasn't mentioned in this round is Fallon Community Health Plan.
This brings the company's total funding to date to at least $17 million.
“Mansa...
A new player has entered the already-crowded activity tracking field, with no $100 device to plug in, charge or sync. Moves, from Finnish startup ProtoGeo, is an activity tracker, but it takes the form of a free iPhone app rather than a wearable device, using a smartphone's built-in accelerometer and GPS to track movement continuously throughout the day.
The app has had 1.5 million downloads...
Deborah Estrin
One of the themes of this year's TEDMED conference was data liberation, kicked off by two speakers: Deborah Estrin, a computer scientist at Cornell Tech and Amy Abernethy, a cancer researcher at Duke Clinical Research Center. Estrin and Abernethy each talked about a rich source of data that could revolutionize healthcare, but isn't currently being tapped; Estrin talked about the "...
The Misfit Shine is an example of a partially passive wearable sensor.
The future of sensors won't be handheld devices like Star Trek's tricorder. It will be invisible sensors in your shoes, floorboards, and cars that quietly collect your health data, analyze it, and alert you, your doctor, or your loved ones only when something goes wrong. That's the prediction in "Making Sense of Sensors: How...
