How to easily get medical technology home? One option is smart toilet seats. The developer of a smart toilet seat has raised $ 30 million to pursue an FDA clearance. With this invention came Casana, which wants to use regular technology in the seats to examine your heart regularly. The examination should be conducted in such a way that you do not even know about it.
The toilet seat will monitor your heart
“The Heart Seat is different from virtually every other vitals monitoring product, in that it takes no time out of your day and works best when you forget it’s even there,” Casana CEO Austin McChord said in a statement.
FierceBiotech: “The startup’s series B round brings its lifetime fundraising total up to $ 46 million. It was founded in 2018 by a postdoc at the Rochester Institute of Technology, initially under the name Heart Health Intelligence. The financing was led by Morningside, with additional backing from Matrix Partners and the company’s series A investors General Catalyst and Outsiders Fund. Last year, Casana launched the first study of the Heart Seat through its Smart Integrated Technologies Lab — or the SIT Lab, for short — to test out the hardware in a controlled environment. ”
The company plans to complete clinical trials as soon as possible, obtain FDA approval, and commercialize the product.
Health data for insurance companies
Casana is researching studies that should help insurance companies collect detailed data on people. The device should be able to detect early changes in cardiovascular health and act preventively in solving problems. For example, a smart toilet seat can measure blood pressure. Do we really want insurance companies to constantly monitor our health?
According to the company, another goal is to be able to better monitor all patients who are discharged from hospitals after the operation. It can detect early signs of heart failure by picking up blood pressure, oxygen levels and heart rate.
“As healthcare moves from the doctor’s office into the home, convenient home monitoring is becoming increasingly important for patient care,” said Jeffrey Leiden, Casana’s chairman of the seat, and former CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
The question remains whether the goal is to help people or whether it is another form of tracking people. In many cases, such technology could save lives. We can only hope that it will not be misused for our monitoring. Would you like these entities to collect detailed information about your health?
Source: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/casana-lands-30m-to-take-its-heart-scanning-smart-toilet-seat-to-fda
Credit: Rochester Institute of Technology/RIM
