Future of MediBio, page-11

I will take a stab at this

The Biotech Daily report you posted makes an important technical comment:



The very early studies done by Hans Stampfer used Holter monitor like devices (so a standard ECG measured overnight and recorded) - and he measured the heart rate variability.

When MEB first started being used commercially, they had a device that was attached to the chest like people use when exercising. In theory that would give reasonable information - although I havent seen the specifics. It did however make it harder to get lots of people using it as they all had to get the device to wear... so.

Jack got deals with wrist wearables and the idea was that they were the solution for ease of use and easy sales and marketing.

That seems to be the problem according to this Biotech Daily statement - they dont work. It is well known in cardiology that wrist wearables are not good at picking up certain irregular heart beats (e.g atrial fibrillation). When they are used then you need a device like a Kardia Band or similar to get all of the components of the heart rhythm. Wearables measure heart rate by some sort of Plethysmography - usually photoplethysmography and that isnt accurate enough.

Add to that - we actually dont know what the black box is measuring. It is apparently more than just heart rate variability and we know from most of the other devices that do this "stress measurement" that they probably just measure heart rate itself... but it is all the IP of all of these companies so we really dont know.

What this article in Biotech daily says - is that the technology needs sleep centre monitoring !! Or I would assume a proper non plethysmography based heart rate measurement.

That will take a different marketing strategy.

If you look back to my earlier posts when I was more of a believer... I always believed that the non medical uses of the technology were going to be better accepted and more profitable than the medical uses - as it takes time for medicos to accept new technology ( I suspect I gave the CT scan analogy - but you can retrieve those posts if you are interested). That was also a reason for running a modified DASS in parallel would help medical acceptance which was why Jack went for VC after the early corporate trials in Australia.

So how do you get it out to a large non medical market if it doesnt work on wrist wearables... It greatly changes the marketing.

These things can all be worked through - but it takes time and money to develop and market.