In 2016, Amaury Saulsberry, an industrial and product design major at the University of Illinois, found out his baby brother suffered from a “severe case acid reflux disease.” For the first few months after his brother was born in May 2016, the disease caused him to vomit repeatedly and be fussy the majority of the time, which doctors repeatedly said was normal for newborns. But Saulsberry and his mother knew that something was off.
“I remember one time my brother was playing and he spit in my dad’s eye and my dad said his eye was burning after that. I was like, ‘There’s no way that saliva was that acidic,’” Saulsberry said. “My mom went to maybe four or five doctors … My mother had four kids before having him, so she knew something was wrong."
The experience Saulsberry him to start Nouvo, an Urbana, Ill.-based healthcare tech company that has created a smart pacifier that sends saliva and temperature data caregivers’ smartphones. The startup, which is vying for a spot in the the Pittsburgh-based AlphaLab Gear accelerator program, is currently working on its trademark and its smart pacifier patent is currently pending, Saulsberry said.
In conversations with doctors about creating the pacifier, Saulsberry discovered that physicians needed more data points to accurately diagnose infants who—beyond displaying unusual behavior—can’t communicate their symptoms and often appear to be healthy during doctor visits.
Since its founding in 2016, the company has grown to six team members, all fellow students, as well as doctors on the company’s advisory board. As it awaits patent approval before attempting to obtain FDA approval, the company is also developing other “connected health” products, Saulsberry said.
In addition to competing in the AlphaLab Gear Hardware Cup, the company aims to start raising funding at the end of summer 2019, primarily from angel investors familiar with medical companies, Saulsberry said. To date, the startup has raised about $37,000, and additional funding raised will go toward perfecting the prototype, which will help the company raise more money in the future, he said.
In the future, Saulsberry foresees the company selling its smart pacifiers in Walmart, Target, Walgreens and other accessible retailers as well as in doctors offices, though the price for the devices hasn’t been determined yet, Saulsberry said. In the meantime, the company has talked with parents and hosted events at schools to get a sense of what to charge for the device and assess parents’ interest in it, he added.
Obtaining FDA approval for the device, which is a Class II medical device, could take up to nine months, Saulsberry said.
Correction: Nouvo is vying for a spot in the AlphaLab Gear accelerator, it has not officially been accepted.
