Imagine, throughout your day, you could know exactly what your body chemistry was up to. More specifically, imagine if the information from your body could instantly go to your doctor and he could make a diagnosis of what your body was doing or what was wrong.
It’s nearly here. Today at CES 2016, a company called Profusa demonstrated a wearable biointegrated sensor, Lumee, that allows for long-term continuous monitoring of your body chemistry. This wearable smart tech device provides actionable data on your body’s key chemistry in one continuous data stream which changes the way we will monitor our health.
Lumee, a biointegrated wearable sensor.
“In between annual physicals we really don’t know what’s going on in our body,” said Ben Hwang, Ph.D., CEO, Profusa. “While fitness trackers and other wearables provide insights into our heart rate, respiration and other physical measures, they don’t provide information on the most important aspect of our health: our body’s chemistry. What if there was a better way of knowing how you’re doing — how you’re really doing?”
According to Statista, the digital health market is expected to reach $233.3 billion by 2020, and that market is being led by the mobile health market.
Since the iPhone hit it big in 2007, consumers and physicians alike (52%) use their smartphone to search for advice, drugs, therapies, etc, and 80% of physicians use smartphones and medical apps. With wearables, physicians can now collect long-term and specialized data that’s much easier to obtain and track patient health behaviors over longer periods of time. This has already changed our relationship with our health care providers and their relationships with us.
“Profusa’s Lumee is a bold attempt at one of the holy grails of personalized medicine, continuous, real time, non-invasive glucose and oxygen monitoring, it’s applications are vast,” said Ryan Bethencourt, Program Director and Venture Partner at Indie.Bio, a bio-tech accelerator in San Francisco. “From Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes monitoring through to fitness and finding optimal training patterns for your body, with data that’s currently impossible to acquire any other way continously. I’m rarely this optimistic about a new medical device, especially one that will require implantation approval from the FDA but in this case, I think the optical biosensor technology and device design warrant the optimism.”
This is why Profusa hopes their tiny (3-5 mm) bioengineered biosensors will enable real-time detection of our body’s unique chemistry in order to give greater insight into a person’s overall health status. Dr. Hwang believes Lumee can be applied to consumer health and wellness applications but also to the management of chronic diseases like Peripheral ArteryDisease (PAD), diabetes and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
TheIdea – The Innovation Agency 