Dragging yourself into the doctor's office once a year to check, at a minimum, your vital signs can be a chore. That's why Lifestone, a startup based in Cambridge, wants to let you keep tabs on how your body is faring from the comfort of your home. The venture has made a portable health tracker that connects to your smartphone to help you monitor your vital signs anywhere, at anytime.
“Lifestone is a revolutionary tracking device,” Anlynn “Hang” Liu, a co-founder at Lifestone and MBA candidate at UMass Dartmouth, told us. “People can track their health data at home. They don’t need to go to [the] hospital. Sometimes, we only want to get our health data in a simpler way - not to wait.”
The device was developed by a team of PhD researchers at Northeastern who focus on micro-sensor technology. According to its current Kickstarter campaign, Lifestone can record and track the following vital signs:
- Blood pressure (via a detachable cuff with a micro air pump)
- Body temperature
- Blood oxygen level
- Heart rate
- Respiration rate
- ECG/EKG
- Stress index
The venture is also offering an optional “StethoStone,” an accompanying device that plugs into your phone, letting you record and share your body’s internal sounds.
Lifestone is HIPPA-compliant. All of the health data you save within its app is encrypted, so no one else can access it - even if they’re using the same device as you.
“Our device is affordable, and you can create many accounts in our app so all the family can use one device separately,” Liu said.
It's important to note Lifestone is not FDA-approved, and Liu told us they aren’t intending on pursuing it for the first generation of their product, despite the overtly medical markers it will be tracking.
“Our first generation is not defined as a medical device,” she said. “It’s a wellness tracking device. But we will develop [the] second generation device beginning early of next year with more functions and do it then.”
People can buy a Lifestone through its Kickstarter campaign for upwards of $69. The campaign ends Oct. 14, and Lifestone has reached just more than half of its crowdfunding goal of $80,000.
Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, Liu said Lifestone raised a $200,000 seed round last year from an investor in China. The money was used to fund research and product development.
