A “virtual medicine cabinet” to provide families with digital tools to manage some aspects of healthcare from home is up and running with the first app in a partnership between Seattle-based health tech startups.
Wavely Diagnostics and Apertur are both University of Washington spinouts working on AI-powered smartphone apps to solve different problems. Wavely’s app uses acoustic reflectometry — reflecting chirps off the eardrum — to detect middle ear fluid, a key sign of ear infections. Apertur’s app uses pupillometry — measuring the eye’s reaction to light — to identify possible neurological conditions like concussion and fatigue.
Assessing or ruling out both conditions at home can provide parents and others with time- and cost-saving piece of mind.
“We did this informal survey of parents about what they worry about the most regarding their kids’ health, and ear infections and head bumps both bubbled up to the very top,” said Arna Ionescu Stoll, CEO of Wavely. “They’re both areas of extremely high parent anxiety that drive a lot of unnecessary clinic visits.”
Wavely’s app is now live in the App Store and serves as the landing place for the medicine cabinet that will include Apertur’s app as well. Use of the apps will cost an annual subscription fee starting at $60 per year.
Results from a Wavely scan, which also requires ear test tips available on Amazon, can be shared directly with virtual care providers, including integrated partners like Summer Health, for streamlined consultations and treatment when needed.
Jacob Reider, chief health officer at Wavely, is a onetime family physician with extensive experience across health tech.
“This is core data science and the way that both of these products work is very reliable and predictable,” Reider said, explaining that if a health pattern is associated with a specific condition, a model can be trained to know that, or know if there is an absence of a condition.
He called Wavely’s app a “disruptive innovation” when it comes to reducing the need for so many quick visits to a pediatrician to check on a potential ear infection.
“Acoustic reflectometry is not a new thing. It’s been around for 20 years. I used it in my practice 20 years ago, but I had to have a $400 device,” Reider said. “And now I don’t … well, it’s a different $400 device that I already have,” he said, holding up his smartphone during a video chat.
Stoll said there is great potential for the medicine cabinet to grow to offer a variety of tools addressing such things as strep throat, skin rashes, anemia detection, hydration detection, respiration, heart rate, blood pressure and more.
“We have been tracking every company that we come across that’s using the smartphone or commodity hardware for medical diagnostics or AI health tools, and there’s 56 of them right now on our list,” Stoll said. “It’s an inevitability that these companies have to come together into a unified platform at some point.”
Wavely was co-founded by Randall Bly, a pediatric ear nose and throat physician and assistant professor at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and Shyam Gollakota, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, whose research spans a variety of areas, including wireless tech, battery-free devices, WiFi sensing and imaging, medical diagnostics via smartphones, and more.
Wavely currently employs 11 people and has raised $7.5 million between equity and grant financing.
