Our takeoff on ace direct response guru Denny Hatch’s ‘Who’s Mailing What!’ has been slightly modified from ‘getting’ to ‘raising’–we do want to be proper ;-) The first big raise happens to be an Editor favorite due to its high Cute Factor–the Owlet smart sock for monitoring your baby’s oxygen level and heart rate. This latest round is $15 million, bringing their funding to $25 million. Investors included Eclipse Ventures and Eniac Ventures, plus new investors Trilogy Equity Partners, the Amazon Alexa Fund, RTP-HC, Capital Integral and Broadway Angels. Owlet is now the commercialization partner on a $1.5 million grant... Continue Reading
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Events last week beyond Brexit: London Technology Week, CE Week NYC
...which came in from 16 blocks uptown. The snap-on button monitor works with any garment (unlike the Mimo onesie and the Owlet sock) and sends baby breathing, rolling onto his or her stomach and fall alerts to your smartphone. According to operations manager Jacob Sussman, MonBaby has been in consumer market release for over a year, selling for $169. What was there? A pedestrian mix of audio, video and computer gadgets–drones were the highlights. It was a brief and disappointing visit for this Editor who’s always had a lot of health tech news out of this event. Wot happened, CEA?... Continue Reading
Unicorns to Series A–health tech funding gained in (perhaps) the nick of time
...we hope it’s closer to the latter than the former. though the new and big entrant to digital health investing is the country most affected, China. Our roundup of the August Action includes ZocDoc, Fitbit, Alphabet, PillPack, Owlet and more, along with a few comments: **ZocDoc, a NYC-based online medical care appointment service that matches patients with doctors by location and schedule, had the most sensational round with last week’s Series D funding of $130 million, giving it a valuation of $1.8 bn. It took over a year after the filing (June 2014) and was led by two foreign funds... Continue Reading
Short takes for a spring Friday: wounds, babies and ‘frequent fliers’
...a new release of software. Release (PDF attached)….A BMJ (British Medical Journal) article critiquing the surge in what we call ‘telehealth for the bassinet set‘ scores the Mimo onesie (Rest Devices), the Owlet sock and the Sproutling band as taking advantage of concerned parents. It’s too much continuous monitoring of vital signs that can vary and yet be quite normal, and no published studies on benefit. A reviewer did find that Owlet is in clinical tests at Seattle Childrens and University of Arizona. MedPageToday (BMJ requires paid access)….A surprise from Philips, which we in the US associate with the Lifeline... Continue Reading
More telehealth for the bassinet set
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/3019806-poster-1280-sprouting.jpg” thumb_width=”160″ /][grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/product_sock-Owlet.png” thumb_width=”160″ /][grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/0ca96884.MimoKimono.png” thumb_width=”160″ /][grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Sensible-baby.jpg” thumb_width=”160″ /]Industry talk is that wearables are no longer the hottest things on the hype curve because of smartwatches and smartphones getting even smarter, but one area is the exception: baby wearables. MedCityNews has an overview of four, three of which we’ve noted since late 2012: Sproutling, Owlet, Rest Devices’ Mimo Turtle (which fastens into Kimono, a/k/a the ‘onesie’) and (new to us) Sensible Baby SmartOne. All have some combination of heart rate, skin temperature, movement/sleep position monitoring from sensors into a smartphone app. Form factors: Sproutling and Owlet... Continue Reading
Pacifying baby, taking temperature
...It is not cleared for sale yet in the UK or US, but was shown at last month’s Mobile World Congress Barcelona and the Smart UK Project in London. Unfortunately, it may be a while before Quantified Self Moms can put it on the list for their baby showers, along with the Owlet monitoring sock, Mimo onesie and iTeddy [TTA 10 Sept]. Related: MedCityNews compares Mimo to adult sleep monitor Lark, awarding the matchup to Mimo. The real matchup is Owlet versus Mimo (see this Editor’s comment). (Also see our comments here discussing the safety of RF monitoring around babies.)... Continue Reading
Wearables on the hype cycle: a ‘Fitbit for babies’
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/3019806-poster-1280-sprouting.jpg” thumb_width=”175″ /]Is nothing sacred? Certainly not when you want a high-performing infant! FastCompany Design goes ga-ga over the Sproutling, an anklet activity monitor for the bassinet set. It tracks heart rate, skin temperature, and movement plus the room’s ambient temperature, humidity and light levels via a camera and sensors in a base station, sending data to parental smartphones. Target price not disclosed. More measurements here than our late summer baby rave, the Owlet smart sock sleep monitor which primarily alerts for dangerous baby rollover onto the stomach and trends in sleep quality, plus blood oxygen and skin temperature.... Continue Reading
Owlet baby monitor sock exceeds funding goal
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Owlet-closeup-small.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]In late August, we followed up on the major league cute ‘n’ useful Owlet monitoring sock and its effort to self-fund development. It’s now exceeded its $100,000 crowdfunding goal at over $121,000 with 721 pledged supporters. Along with this of course is the obligation to deliver products in November. What this points to is the appeal of a product addressing the powerful concern of baby wellness and sleep–a ‘job to be done’–and that it can be done outside of the usual East/West Coast accelerator, cocktail party and D3H hype loop in decidedly unfashionable, abstemious Utah. Congratulations in... Continue Reading
‘Angel (Investment) in America’ perking up
...retail and industrial firms. On the whole, their forecasts stand in sharp contrast to the current sentiments of, at best, overall mediocre growth in 2014 (Forbes). Worthworm itself is interesting as it claims to be shortly marketing a web-based pre-money valuation system that takes this complex task and makes it simple. The co-founder earlier founded SkyMall, the inflight catalog which has helped many airplane travelers while away their time. (Young Entrepreneur interview) And not waiting for angels or ‘worms’ is baby sock monitor Owlet [TTA 27 August] moving quite smartly to $65,242 of $100,000 on its own crowdfunding page, with... Continue Reading
Owlet baby monitor sock moving to market
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/product_sock-Owlet.png” thumb_width=”150″ /]About nine months ago [TTA 6 Dec 12], the Owlet baby monitor in prototype won a student competition at Brigham Young University. It definitely ‘socked it” to this Editor at the time as an elegant way to monitor baby vital signs or signs of distress; it is a sensor-rich sock transmitting to a smartphone. While it still had pending patents, needed further prototyping and of course no FDA approval, I recommended “if you’re an angel looking for a highly marketable telehealth item–and with adult uses in hospitals and nursing homes–a trip to Utah may be in order.”... Continue Reading
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