DECEMBER 25, 2013,
7:59 AM
By QUENTIN HARDY
Scanadu’s medical device is about
two inches wide and a half-inch thick. When held to the forehead, it can measure
oxygen intake, breathing and heart rate.
When Walter De Brouwer puts his head to something, he can
produce single-handedly what usually takes several hospital machines and labs.
His single hand, it should be said, holds a small and promising device with
which Mr. De Brouwer, the co-founder and chief executive of Scanadu, hopes to remake medicine.
The object Scanadu is working on is an oval disk about two
inches wide and a half-inch thick. Held to the forehead, it uses light to
measure oxygen intake, an accelerometer to figure out how far the chest extends
in breathing, and a small electrical plate under the thumb to measure heart
rate. Other sensors, some still in development, will measure temperature, blood
pressure and other body functions.
In some cases the sensors are taking direct measurements,
including some from a mild circuit that is created by the loop of the arm to
the forehead and through the body, which the device reads and sends to a
smartphone app. Still others are planned to deduce more information, using
software that draws from among the different measurements.
The Scanadu device is a long way from perfect, despite
having been through a significant revision since it was first announced to some
hoopla (the
“Star Trek” tricorder comparisons came fast) a year ago. In an informal
test, it first got my heart rate 60 beats per minute above what it had been in
a doctor’s office a week before. A few moments later, it seemed absolutely
accurate.
And that, in a sense, is part of the point. Rather than
taking the rigorous and expensive approach usually applied to medical devices,
Scanadu works like a software company. It creates a product, then toys with it,
improving the software and tweaking the algorithms. Eventually, both theory and
experience show, a product can become pretty good.
“It’s all off-the-shelf stuff,” Mr. De Brouwer said. His
Mountain View, Calif., company hopes to have the device available as a mass
market consumer product in late 2014, for about $199. “It’s the algorithms that
are new.”
Mr. De Brouwer, a well-known tech entrepreneur, sees the
device as only a part of his ultimate goal. “Everyone who comes into a hospital
is so powerless,” he said. “Why don’t we have our own devices, so we can create
and take our own data about ourselves?” Once we do, he figures, we can share
and pool the data for novel research in a kind of homemade medical hackathon.
Quentin Hardy/The New York TimesWalter De Brouwer, the
founder and chief executive of Scanadu, demonstrating his company’s device.
Scanadu gained notice when it raised $1.6 million on
Indiegogo, the crowdfunding website. Of the 8,800 people who gave money to the
project, he says, some 1,100 were medical professionals (mostly doctors and
nurses) in the United States. These contributors will soon receive an early
version of the device, and their experience with it will go into further
improving the product. Since then the company has picked up another $10.5
million in funding.
Scanadu has one of consumer tech’s more somber creation
histories. Mr. De Brouwer, who is originally from Belgium, made a fortune
during the first Internet boom, then lost much of it in the crash. He was
earning the money back with a financial institution he purchased in 2003, when
his son, then 4 years old, fell about 40 feet, landing head first on a concrete
pavement.
The child was in a coma for 11 weeks, and eventually lost
half of his brain; he is now in a school in California. Mr. De Brouwer spent a
year inside a Belgian hospital, looking after his son and learning how to
interpret a large number of medical machines. “I didn’t know anything about
medicine — what a child’s blood pressure should be, what oxygenation was, what
any of the displays said or how they worked,” he said.
Eventually he figured most of them out, and asked an
administrator in the hospital’s information technology department where all the
data was consolidated for collective analysis. “He told me that everything was
stored 1:1; it didn’t get compared,” he said. “To someone from the tech world,
this was like something from the dinosaur age.”
Mr. De Brouwer hopes not just to sell the device, but also
to create a substantial body of people willing to store and share complex
medical readings over a long period, measuring effects like stress and heart
rates. He’s also running a “wet lab,” which is looking into a similar test
system for urine and saliva.
That could produce both personalized medicine and a kind of
collective information about the relationships between, say, respiration,
temperature and oxygen intake before the onset of a disease.
The product still needs approval from the Food and Drug
Administration, which will look at how people use the device and whether it is
safe for individual use. Scripps Translational Science Institute will
also be doing a study, drawn from the Indiegogo contributors, on the accuracy
of the device.
A version of this article appears in print on 12/30/2013, on
page B5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Hurt Son Inspires Father’s
Invention.
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