This healthtech startup is used to being the butt of other people's jokes. And they're fine with it.
Why? Because their at-home heart monitor comes in a form not usually seen in home-health devices: It's a toilet seat.
Casana is a startup based in Boston and Rochester, New York, and its product is called the Heart Seat. The toilet seat contains an EKG sensor, a ballistocardiogram, a photoplethysmogram, and an internal battery designed to keep the monitor running for years.
Investors are buying in: Casana raised $14 million in Series A financing early last year, and is moving towards its plan to receive FDA approval in the next year or so. If approved by the FDA, the toilet seat will be a prescription device which doctors can recommend for their patients to get a continuous flow of data, collected into the cloud securely and sent back to the doctor.
The premise, developed by founder and chief scientific officer Nicholas Conn while he was working on his Ph.D. at the Rochester Institute of Technology, aims to make it much easier for people with chronic conditions, who need to keep a close eye on their health, to get data about their hearts.
Casana has been testing the product, in tightly controlled validation studies, in Florida’s Villages retirement community and at its facilities in Boston and Rochester. It is also sending the seats to people’s homes for them to try out. 500 subjects have taken part in that program so far. The company has collected all sorts of data, including information it didn’t necessarily expect to collect — such as seniors’ bathroom habits.
Not shy about 'toilet jokes'
Casana’s CEO is Austin McChord, who founded and led the data backup company Datto until it was acquired for $1.5 billion in 2017.
“You have to absolutely be committed and excited to the cause to be like, yes, I want to work for a company that makes a toilet seat,” McChord said in an interview. “We are not shy about toilet jokes, and we are very committed to delivering here, because it's just something you can't be 'so-so' about. You got to just be like, yes, this is the future of healthcare. I believe, and I'm going to make it happen. And so that's been really amazing.”
His move to the company in August 2020 came after a pivot. He was supposed to move to France to lead a cybersecurity company there, but Covid wiped out those plans and instead, he got introduced to Conn and felt it was a good match.
“At Datto, we were best when you don’t have to think about our product at all. It does what it’s supposed to do, it automatically recovers and just disappears into the background,” McChord said. Casana fills a similar niche, albeit in a very different field, helping deliver healthcare at home in a way which doesn’t add “any complexity to your life,” he said.
The company is facing what McChord called a “pretty high bar” from the FDA to get a cuffless blood pressure product approved, and it’s filing as a “de novo” or first-of-its kind device. It’s been going back and forth with regulators ahead of the official submission.
Casana is hoping the seat will be available and on the market by the third quarter of this year.
