With online healthcare at boom, one can find a wide array of services just on a click today. Even, some startups, going a step ahead are trying to make these services more personalized. But what about people who are still reluctant to go to doctors unless it becomes an emergency or to maintain their medical records? The problem becomes severe if the person is suffering from some chronic disorder and requires daily attention to his medicines and vitals.
In order to solve this, Manu Madhusudanan, an Engineering graduate who earlier had worked with Yahoo and Microsoft, recently launched an IoT platform, Cooey. According to the facts, there are 30 Mn diabetic and 130 Mn hypertension patients in India. The Bangalore-based platform currently targets Antenatal and chronic patients requiring recurring services. The idea is to be an end to end family health monitoring platform to collect (device), store, analyze and provide insights of vital signs for patients.
Till now, Health IT includes Hospital Information System (HIS) and other products/apps, but still there is a missing last mile link – Engagement with patient. Cooey is that missing shoe in this entire process. It’s the 3rd platform for chronic patient health management. “3rd Platform is about engaging patients to health management system and providing targeted services to them. We are using IoT Ecosystem to enable and fill this gap,” said Manu.
The web platform is more like a shopping portal where one can buy the bluetooth enabled devices such as Blood Pressure Monitor, Smart body analyser and Smart Glucometer. The vitals measured from these devices are transferred automatically to the mobile app into the centralized cloud storage. This feature allows the patient’s caretaker to keep an eye on the fluctuations, even if he/she is sitting abroad.
Manu further explained this by citing an example. Today, when a person goes to a doctor and take the medicines, usually, he would stop taking them until he starts feeling worse. With Cooey, even the people taking care of the patient can regularly log his data, get the detailed analysis and share them with the doctor automatically. This allows them to maintain a clear medical history and thereby get an accurate diagnosis.
The device can prompt the user to order recurring medicines before they run out. It provides the service “Smart assist”, which helps the patients in getting personalized tips and recommendations. Also, with resultant analysis, one can keep track of their health issues and control the vitals on his own simultaneously.
Currently, Cooey is focussed on the B2B2C space and going forward it plans to service customers directly.
The founders are partnering with three hospital chains for the home care and antenatal care. In addition, the founders have recently closed a seed funding of around $470k (INR 3 Cr) from Subhash Goyal, President, Digital Circuits.
Technical Aspects and Current Status
Angularjs, J2ee and MongoDB are used in the tech stack. All services are exposed as REST based API as part of the platform. This allows third party integration easy. All the devices have Android and iPhone SDK.
At present, the devices are available only on pre-order and will be released in batches. Also, the recurring medicine delivery service will be available in later months. Globally, the portal competes with WiThings and IHealth. However, as per Manu, their distinct advantage is being economical and closely integrated end to end solution with personalization for chronic patients.
Market Opportunity and Plans Ahead
According to a research, 80 % of the market is still captured by retail. However, it is expected that by 2020, addressable market size for chronic patients in top 11 urban cities, with access to smartphone will reach $5 Bn in India.
The team is getting access to a huge amount of data comprising of medical state, medicines used, lab reports, etc of its users. This would help them in creating dynamic profiles of people thereby allowing them to suggest doctors to the people, as the job portals suggest jobs based on CVs of the people. “ In Long Term we want to be the LinkedIn of Medical Profiles with Personalized Offering to the Patients. The data we collect will empower the future,” said Manu.
Editor’s Take
Since the IoT concept came in 1999, a lot has been changed. Many industries such as Oil and gas, transportation,FMCG, etc., have got serious transformations including Healthcare. There is need for platforms which have reach to common masses and cooey is surely one of them.
