Life insights
Startup aims to boost personal health with anxiety monitor
KITCHENER — The wristband is a biofeedback device that continually tracks blood volumes flowing through veins and translates that information into a graph on smartphone screens.
Users can quickly see when anxiety levels are rising or falling. The graphs are updated every five minutes based on measurements the small box records 500 times per second.
Kitchener-based Airo Health publicly launched its product last month and now has about 120 users in Canada, United States, Europe, South America and Australia.
Within eight months, Airo hopes to have 5,000 users, said Naman Kumar, the startup’s co-founder and chief executive officer.
Airo markets the wristband as a way to monitor anxiety levels and gain a better understanding of the causes. It says the device can be used to learn ways of reducing anxiety.
Light emitting diodes on the bottom of the device are next to the user’s skin. The lights flash on and off 500 times a second. A photodiode collects the light that is reflected back from the body, said Kumar.
The quality of that reflected light changes along with the volume of blood flowing through the veins. Software developed by Airo translates that information into graphs and alerts that are displayed on the user’s smartphone, said Kumar.
“It is not just tracking you, it is advising you,” he said.
The device maintains a running total of the minutes you are anxious in a day and compares that to the previous day. It also records the total number of steps taken during a day, and compares that to the previous day’s total. When anxiety levels reach a certain point, the wrist monitor vibrates and suggests a time out for some deep breathing or a short walk.
The device sends a message to your smartphone, asking you what you were doing when the anxiety alert occurred.
“The idea is it brings your awareness to the moment,” said Maryam Jahed, Airo’s co-founder and chief operating officer.
The Airo unit sells for $200. As revenue increases along with the number of users, the startup wants to expand the capabilities of the Airo platform focusing on four areas — stress, sleep, exercise and diet.
It will track calorie intake, calorie burns, the nutrition quality associated with the calories in different foods, blood glucose levels, blood pressure, sleep patterns and anxiety levels. The objective is to turn the Airo stress monitor into the iPhone for your personal health, said Kumar.
“By wearing this you can track a whole bunch of stuff about your body that you usually need to go to a lab to figure out what is going on,” said Kumar.
“The end goal is not to track stuff, it is to help people change behaviour, to take that data and give you insights about your life.”
Kumar and Jahed are graduates of the University of Waterloo. Kumar studied computer engineering while Jahed studied electrical engineering. Both wanted their engineering education to be informed by a broader perspective. So Jahed did a second degree in sociology. Kumar audited courses in psychology, sociology, philosophy, human-computer interaction and design.
After it was founded in 2013, Airo was incubated in Velocity, UW’s startup program in the Tannery building in downtown Kitchener. It won about $100,000 in pitch fund competitions and then moved to the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto, where it raised more money from individual investors. After that, it was off to the Y Combinator accelerator in Silicon Valley.
In total, Airo has raised about $600,000. The startup now rents space from Communitech in the Tannery for its eight employees.