Bangalore-based proactive healthcare provider, Touchkin, has raised $400K in seed funding from a few angel investors including Alok Mittal (ex-Canaan Partners), Amit Gupta (co-founder of InMobi), Anuj Srivastava (CEO of Livspace), Himanshu Aggarwal (CEO of Aspiring Minds), Raghunandan G (co-founder TaxiForSure), and Puneet Agarwal (co-founder of Moneyview).
The startup is a predictive health care provider for elders that uses mobile-based social sensing to enable proactive personalised care, thus bringing help to those who need it, from care experts or families.
Touchkin was started by Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vempati in 2015. The founder believes that around 2 Bn smartphones are being used by individuals which have almost become an extended part of all human beings. If this extended part is made useful in identifying potential health issues through changes in mobility, activity, communication and sleep patterns, it would be more valuable to us. Thus, Touchkin’s proprietary prediction engine learns patterns in behaviour that may mean mental or physical ill-health and connects the user with direct support. It also provides alerts that can offer proactive personalised care to at-risk patients with chronic, age-related or mental illnesses to enable early identification of symptoms.
Touchkin’s mobile app StayClose is used to virtually see family’s well-being and trigger alerts if their activity patterns indicate something is wrong.
Jo Aggarwal, founder of Touchkin, told, “Mobile healthcare is a $46 Bn opportunity and the sensor technology needed for this is already in our hands. Our platform uses passive data from smartphone sensors to create a picture of a person’s well being and identifies potential health issues. This is very powerful because unlike most mobile health apps it doesn’t require any change in user behaviour.”
The ten-membered team of Touchkin has already witnessed 1 Mn sensing events, and has tracked 2 Mn behaviour hours till date. It also claims to have 3,000 users in the pilot phase with around 300K user interactions.
How does it work?
The startup has ‘StayClose care app’ that uses Touchkin’s predictive care platform to help family members care for their loved ones while being afar.
The app creates ‘How Cards’ that answers to the questions like how far are they from home, the amount of battery left in phone, last activity, along with setting alerts for notification. However, unlike family locator apps, StayClose is a non-intrusive way to know about the well-being of your loved ones.
Touchkin also uses the data and analytics approach to analyse data from phone and convert it into meaningful patterns to tell what is ‘normal’ for someone and what is an unusual change that needs investigation.
The startup plans to use the raised funds to build its team, grow user base and run healthcare pilots in domestic and international markets for depression and diabetes patients.
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