From virtual therapy to mindfulness and meditation aids, there’s little shortage of digital tools catching investors’ eyes and breaking into the crowded behavioral health market. Although a number of these services are positioning their business to focus on payers and employers, many others are taking their products directly to consumers via monthly subscriptions, one-time retail purchases or...
Basis, an app-based platform that connects consumers with mental health counselors, announced the launch of its service alongside a $3.75 million funding round. The investment was led by Bedrock, with support from Wave Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Headlined by CEO Andrew Chapin, a former Uber executive, and Chief Science Officer Lindsay Trent, a clinical psychologist at Stanford,...
London-based BioBeats, which is developing a wellness solution for consumers using artificial intelligence, smartphones and wearable sensors, has completed a study on corporate stress and health with employees from financial services company BNP Paribas.
A group of 560 BNP Paribas employees wore the (recently discontinued) Microsoft Band 2 to continuously measure various biometric measurements...
In 2012, MobiHealthNews ran an article — contributed by patent lawyer Orion Armon of Cooley LLP — asking the question “Is mobile health about to enter a patent thicket?” Armon had noticed a stark rise in the number of patents being issued in the mobile health space. He predicted that this would likely lead to an increase in mobile health patent litigation.
Four years later, we haven’t seen nearly...
Intel subsidiary Basis is recalling its Peak fitness tracking watch. The company halted production of the device at the end of June due to an overheating issue that affected just 0.2 percent of the watches on the market, but had hoped to fix the issue with a software update. Now, developers are throwing in the towel, issuing a voluntary recall, and offering full refunds.
"We had hoped to update...
Basis Science, the high-end fitness wearable company that was acquired by Intel in March 2014, has halted sales of its newest device, the Basis Peak, because of concerns about overheating. The company won't sell any more devices -- and has requested that its users not wear those they currently own -- until it completes a software update that will shut down the device when it begins to overheat.
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Two of the biggest IPOs in digital health lately have come out of the wearable and telehealth spaces. But those aren't the spaces at least two seasoned digital health investors are most excited about. At BIO 2016 in San Francisco last week, Casper de Clerq, a general partner at Norwest Venture Partners, and Dr. Lucian Iancovici, a general partner at dRx Capital, Qualcomm and Novartis' joint...
Updated with statement from Fitbit.
Fitbit's ongoing legal battle with Jawbone about patents has heated up recently, as Fitbit claims that certain Jawbone patents are overly broad and thus invalid. Fitbit is challenging a Jawbone patent before the US Patent and Trade Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board as well as asking the ITC to throw out three others based on a Supreme Court precedent....
Although the activity tracking and consumer health market is growing more crowded every day, Casper de Clercq, an investor recently promoted to general partner at Norwest Venture Partners, said in the future it will be medical-focused, not consumer, wearable companies that offer the better return on investment.
Clercq has invested in consumer health companies, including Misfit and Basis, which...
Practice Fusion's Ryan Howard (right) and MobiHealthNews' Jonah Comstock at Health 2.0 2014 (Source: Health 2.0)
Practice Fusion announced that its CEO and founder Ryan Howard will step back away from the helm of the cloud-based EHR company, but will stay on as the company's board chairman. Tom Langan, Practice Fusion's chief commercial officer, will become the company's interim CEO. According...
