Contactless Health Monitor

Gaurav Parchani’s vision was to simplify healthcare and make it more accessible using data science and artificial intelligence. He went on to develop a health monitoring system for humans using a technology he had used earlier to monitor the health of racing cars. The health monitoring device led to the evolution of Dozee, a company Parchani co-founded with Mudit Dandwate. Today, Dozee’s health monitoring system has proven to be 98.4 per cent as accu­rate as medical grade devices. Recently the startup raised Rs 12.5 crore from Prime Venture Partners, YourNest Venture Capital and 3one4 Capital, along with grants from various institutions.

The year 2020 proved testing both in terms of health and livelihood. A lot of healthcare providers took recourse to the digital medium to reach out to patients as the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown it necessitated, restricted movement.The Dozee team spent time with doctors and hospital administrations to help them circumvent the need for physical travel. “In the early days of the pandemic, when we helped hospitals set up ICUs for Covid wards, our team leveraged vir­tual platforms to help nurses inside Covid wards both in cities and in the rural districts,” muses Parchani.

A Covid Saviour

Dozee’s contactless Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) system was adopted by hundreds of hospitals and used to monitor thousands of patients for life-saving alerts. “Post Covid, we are expanding aggres­sively in RPM, in terms of production and operational capabilities with a healthy 20 per cent MoM revenue growth,” says Parchani.

Attributing Dozee’s success to innovation, Parchani explains how its health monitoring system captures vital signs like heartbeats, respira­tory cycles, etc. in a contactless manner with medical grade accuracy to identify early signs of deterioration in health. 

“We understand that innovation takes time, resources and patience to bear fruits,” he says, “Dozee went commercial after four years of R&D and productization. We’ve established a separate team for further innovation in HealthTech with the vision of making healthcare more acces­sible. These include, contact­less blood pressure monitoring, screening for heart failure and cardiac contractility and sleep apnea. These are all in beta right now,” he goes on to say. 

The healthcare industry being heavily regulated, devel­oping, validation and approvals for healthcare solutions take time. “Even after going through this cycle, it takes time before the healthcare community starts accepting new and unconven­tional solutions,” points out Parchani. “This nature makes it difficult for any startup to make a dent among established compa­nies in the domain. Dozee is one of the few startups that have been able to deploy in the field commer­cially,” he says.

Going Forward

Talking of his plans for the coming years, Parchani says, “We’ll be launching contactless blood pres­sure monitoring for the first time in India. We’re also in the middle of our regulatory approvals - ISO-13485, FDA, ISO-27001, GDPR and HIPPA compliance. Moreover, we have a target of monitoring a million patients pan India and to touch thousands of lives.”

Parchani believes that scalabil­ity, robustness and reliability of technology are necessary for this to happen. “However, our AI will need to evolve to not only trigger alerts but also assist healthcare providers to optimise their work­flow. We ensure a healthy feedback fromhealthcare providers that helps the AI engine become more efficient each day,” he adds.

Equipped with regulatory approvals, the company now plans to expand globally to establish Dozee as a standard for RPM- Made in India. 

The founders plan to add spe­cific parameters to their remote patient-monitoring suite to address cardiovascular, nephrol­ogy, pulmonary and neurology cases.