It’s a great time to be a healthtech startup – the conversations around digital healthcare have never been more robust, and the need, never more pronounced. COVID19 is placing an immense amount of strain on the nation’s healthcare resources and infrastructure – and this may finally be Indian healthtech’s watershed moment.

Bangalore-based Dozee, India’s first contactless remote health monitoring startup, just raised INR 12.5 cr from Prime Venture Partners, YourNest Venture Capital and 3one4Capital – an investment that is well and truly reflective of the times we live in, according to Dr. Vivek Mansingh, General Partner at YourNest VC. He said, “Today, healthcare is only serving the top one third of the world population. To democratize healthcare and make it available to everyone across the world, technology will play a critical role. Dozee is a deep tech startup from India that moves the needle in this direction. Using its proprietary sensing technology and advanced AI algorithms, Dozee not only can provide quality healthcare to millions of individuals, but also, by precisely monitoring the vitals of users at home & hospitals, can improve their health & avoid escalations by allowing for timely interventions.”

The startup has been awarded grants by the GoI’s BIRAC, IKP Knowledge Park, Sine IIT Bombay, ACT and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It has also filed several patents on detecting and predicting respiratory, cardiac & neurological patterns & providing in-depth analysis of vital signals for early warning of health deterioration.

The Genesis and Utility of Dozee

Cofounders Gaurav Parchani and Mudit Dandwate launched the product last year. They met while working at Altair Engineering, and wanted to develop a solution that makes remote health monitoring easy. Parchani says, “The time we sleep is essential for our body to repair and rejuvenate, build immunity and promote hormone regulation. This vital window of 6-8 hours on average also relays a lot of information about the human body. We also realized there are practically no products in the market that can accurately track one’s parameters like heart rate and oxygen saturation whilst asleep. This is what led us to build Dozee.”

Parchani and Dandwate dedicated five years of research to develop this product, in conjunction with hospitals like NIMHANS and Jayadeva Institute in Bangalore.

Dozee tracks key vitals of the human body such as heart rate, respiration rate, oxygen saturation, sleep stages, stress recovery and more with a medical-grade 98.4% accuracy. The contactless sensor, placed under a mattress, captures real-time body vitals without using any external wires or touching the user’s body. The sensor captures micro-vibrations produced by the body every time the heart pumps blood, during inhalation, exhalation, muscle twitches, tremors and body movements. An AI-powered, early warning system converts these signals into biomarkers and uses the data to present an analysis of the patient's health through a smartphone app, for retail users.

Why Ballisto Cardiography Could Be A Viable Mass Monitoring Method For Cardiac Patients:

Dozee works on a technology called Ballistocardiography (BCG), a non-invasive method that tracks vibrations from every heartbeat, respiration & smallest of body movements. Dozee has built a proprietary Advanced Health Intelligence System that extracts biomarkers and vital parameters from the noisy vibration data captured by the sensors. The AI system helps is identifying health deterioration through abnormalities across all vital parameters Dozee measures. In many cases, the AI system has successfully predicted early health deterioration in conditions ranging from fever to heart failure, even before the patient could see the symptoms.

It is proving to be specifically useful to anticipate Myocardial Infarction (MIs) or heart attacks, cardiac failure, instead of ECHOs which are expensive and require specialist to monitor. A study done by Dozee along with Bangalore's Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research (SJICSR) involved 234 subjects were enrolled with varying degrees of systolic dysfunction at a high volume tertiary center. Echocardiography was done on a Philips iE33 Ultrasound Machine to measure patient heart rate. At the same time, a Ballisto Cardiography (BCG) sensor - Dozee - was placed under the mattresses of patients while the Echocardiography was being performed. The results revealed that screening for systolic dysfunction and early signs of heart failure through BCG sensors is feasible. Its ease of use, low portability and cost make it a viable mass screening tool.

Currently, over 30 healthcare institutes use Dozee including Kauvery Hospital, IGMC Nagpur, ILS Kolkata, Chengalpattu Medical College, Kingsway Hospital, and Ministry of Ayush. Dozee has been delivered to more than 1000 homes to monitor the elderly and more than hundreds of people are using Dozee to keep track of their own health for chronic conditions.

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, over 1,200 Dozees have been deployed in over 20 quarantine centres across eight states. Dozee has so far monitored over 4,000 COVID-19 patients in institutional settings, saving more than 6,000 nursing hours. Overall, Dozee has sold more than 5,000 units.

Parchani says the response during COVID19 has been very uplifting, and establishes the need for realtime vitals sensing, home health care, and continuum care.