This startup taps the power of big data analytics to make you healthier

Photo credit: Biofourmis wants to be the one to organize all that data and create insights from them – insights that we can then act upon to keep ourselves healthy.

Or, as Biofourmis’ chief business officer Gourab Mukherjee puts it, “to spend as little of our life in a hospital bed as possible.”

The company bills itself as the world’s first personalized physiological data analytics firm, and today it announced a fundraise of US$1 million. The round was led by healthcare technology company SpesNet and social innovation firm Eden Strategy. It was joined by angel investors from the healthcare space.

Tech for health

Biofourmis was incorporated in November 2015, founded by Kuldeep Singh and Mark Niu. The team has created an analytics engine called Biovitals, that is based on several deep technologies like cognitive technology, natural language processing, advanced statistical modelling, advanced machine learning, and biosignal processing.

Biofourmis wants to create highly customized health profiles by aggregating several different data sources.

All these arcane-sounding words basically mean that the system is able to gather data from a multitude of sources, process it, and give you personalized information and recommendations about your health.

“All of our interpretations of health data is done in comparison to population-based metrics,” Gourab tells Tech in Asia. “For example, 72bps is supposed to be a normal heart rate, 120/80 is supposed to be a standard blood pressure. But all these standards were derived from years and years of population research done mostly in the West.”

Apply these standards to African or Asian countries, Gourab says, and suddenly they don’t look so useful anymore.

That’s why Biofourmis wants to create highly customized health profiles by aggregating several different data sources. “We have access to over 250 APIs,” Gourab says, including wearables like Fitbit and Jawbone, structured databases from hospitals, and even unstructured data sources like a standard lab report that you get after an examination.

Biofourmis has access to hundreds of fitness wearable APIs to gather and process data from. Photo credit: Pexels.com

Everyday monitoring

The company looks to apply its technology in two major ways:

One is by deploying the engine to hospitals, allowing them to create a health profile for their patients and monitor their health remotely with the help of standard wearables. Gourab brings up cardiac rehabilitation as an example – a patient who leaves a cardiologist’s office after a mild episode needs to follow a routine to ensure she recovers normally. If the patient fails to do that, it’s quite possible she’ll soon find herself being wheeled back through the hospital doors.

The startup’s Biovitals engine helps the doctor monitor each patient, reminds the patient to keep to their medication, and records when and how something goes wrong. This way, the hospital can provide more meaningful help and also lower the rate at which patients need to be readmitted.

Connected health