Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator gives new ideas healthy jolts
By Mark Davis, The Kansas City Star | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
The
Sure enough. His friend in nearby
"That's when it occurred to me -- what I was doing could be done on a much larger scale," Dodge said.
Sickweather was born.
Dodge's website and mobile app produce localized maps of sickness outbreaks by tapping into the chatter on social media. In real time, they track everything from flu to pink eye and from strep throat to chicken pox.
Last week, Sickweather moved to
These 10 specially chosen fledglings will gain up to
Sprint launched the business accelerator last September in
It's a powerful combination, giving the startups access to Sprint's testing labs, research facilities and network engineers through programs backed by Techstars' record with accelerators in
The 10 companies they've assembled all deal with health -- though not always human health -- and run the gamut from wearables to medical record retrieval apps.
The teams arrived last week.
Teams came in alphabetically, Akibah first and Yosko last, which means it enjoyed the largest welcoming party because it included all the other teams.
Geographically, they hail from around
Some may stick. It happens frequently at the accelerators Techstars has run.
"They build deep connections to the community and stay," said
Dodge, who is 38 and the father of three boys, said that in just a few days he has found
Only recently have social media gained the critical mass needed to paint an accurate picture of an area's emerging collective health, he said. The kicker is that trends emerge on Twitter a few weeks sooner than in the CDC's data.
And Sickweather can push notifications through its app so users know when they're heading into an outbreak of some kind.
"We're really granular and hyper-local. We can tell you what's going around your immediate community," Dodge said.
What's left to do?
Dodge sees the mobile app as Sickweather's strong suit and welcomes the chance to work with Sprint. He's also aware of Techstar's track record.
And then there is money.
"We tried to raise funding in
Here's what two other accelerator businesses are working on.
FitBark
FitBark, another accelerator business, is based in
He'd been working in
"I really needed to fill training gaps in financing, accounting, economics -- things I had never studied before," Rossi said.
It led to a job as an investment banker, helping other companies raise capital or find mergers. Rossi saved some money and then called his sister,
"It was incredibly difficult to start a company in
FitBark sells a wearable fitness device for dogs, somewhat like the Nike+ FuelBand around Rossi's left wrist. He's used the device since it came out and has seen wearable technology get better, recently learning how to tell whether the wearer is doing push-ups or squats, or running.
"This is the way bracelets are getting smarter on the human side of things. And the same thing is going to happen with the pets," Rossi said.
FitBark fits on a dog's collar and tracks the animal's behavior. It feeds the results to the company's servers, and the app makes it accessible to your cellphone or computer.
Alone, the dog's information is useful for an owner. Combined with others' it gains validity. FitBark is building behavior baselines for 250 breeds of dogs of all ages.
"We are a data company," Rossi said. "Nobody knows, not even the vets know, what is typical in terms of activity points and sleep habits for a Yorkie of 7 pounds and 11 years of age, like I have."
The baselines give dog owners something to model their pet's behavior after, to set goals and help the animals achieve them.
Rossi also sees applications for veterinarians, for example, to monitor an animal's behavior after surgery.
But, just dogs?
"We are dog people, but nothing prevents us from targeting other species." Rossi said.
Some customers have put FitBark on cats. Others have asked about horses and bunnies. A university even wants it for a study of penguins.
"We think dogs are interesting for us as a startup, as a company," Rossi said. "The dog market is incredibly big."
Medicast
"There's no technology being used by a lot of house call physicians. It's still very much in an old-school way, which makes it very difficult for a lot of doctors to break into that," said <person>Nafis Zebarjadi, chief technology officer and the older of the two brothers.
The Medicast plan is to build a network of house-call doctors in a market. The app allows a consumer to request a doctor visit within two hours.
Their idea came up two years ago when the brothers were a continent apart.
Sam, who is 30, was working in
They've built a prototype app and worked with a third co-founder,
"We've got a small handful of physicians that are working closely with us to iron out all the kinks in the process and make sure we can deliver this at scale," Nafis said. "The goal now is to begin expanding into other markets."
And that will mean recruiting physicians and doing background checks.
Medicast focuses on high-quality care, allowing the doctor to spend time with a patient rather than work through a day's appointment list. Sam called it concierge medicine.
Though that sounds expensive, the men said it can be affordable. By working with house call doctors, Medicast avoids perhaps half of the overhead costs of a traditional brick-and-mortar practice, Nafis said.
One appeal is to consumers with high-deductible health insurance. Medicast will provide a package including preventive and urgent care as well as doctor visits for
Medicast also has the potential to affect the health care system by handling many of the routine cases that can clog emergency rooms.
The app is available now, but until Medicast is up and running in a market, it provides locations of urgent care centers.
"We like to consider ourselves almost like urgent care on wheels," said Sam, for whom the move to
He had worked for Nextel in
Companies at the Sprint accelerator
--Akibah,
--FitBark,
--Lifeline Response,
--Medicast,
--Ollo Mobile,
--Prime,
--Sickweather,
--Symptom.ly,
--
--Yosko,
To reach
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