Monitor your coronavirus symptoms while you sleep

Mudit Dandwate and Gaurav Parchani met while working at Altair Engineering, where they designed race car simulators. After close to two years, they realised they were making high adrenaline but low-impact innovations. The IIT graduates decided to set up Turtle Shell Technologies in 2015 and move into the health care space.

It launched a health monitoring device in July 2019, Dozee, that is kept under a mattress to capture the body’s micro vibrations. “We benchmarked the product against other medical equipment to prove we are more than 98.4 percent accurate, while being contactless,” says Dandwate.

The company was focussing on selling to high-risk patients and senior citizens, but the pandemic opened new business avenues. Dozee already covered most of the health parameters needed for monitoring Covid-19. “But,” says Dandwate, “there were factors such as oxygen levels and blood pressure that were missing.” These parameters were added, and Dozee was integrated with third-party devices. Now the team is working on including temperature monitoring.

The company started getting requests from a number of hospitals. “Dozee was a perfect fit for monitoring patients in hospitals and homes. Nurses don’t need to check on patients for things like vitals. Through Dozee, we are updating those every 30 seconds,” says Dandwate.

The data is collected in real-time, and can be monitored from a control room, minimising interactions between health care workers and patients. Changes in readings send alerts immediately to doctors or family members. “These alerts have led to timely transfers of patients to ICUs and helped in saving lives,” he adds.

The device has two variants: The basic one that costs ₹7,999, and another with an oximeter that costs ₹9,999. Its revamped version was launched in mid-May and has seen close to 2,000 installations in 12 hospitals. “Earlier, we sold via aggregators, but are now selling via Amazon and our website,” says Dandwate. Production has been ramped up from 500 devices a month to 2,000-2,500.

“Pre-Covid, we were earning close to ₹17 lakh per month, now it is ₹50 lakh,” he says. “While we were backed by a number of grants, including BIRAC and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we have raised an additional ₹3 crore from angel investors during the pandemic.”