Evan Davies and Tim Walker got the idea for their athlete-safety technology while working in a biomedical engineering lab at Case Western Reserve University.
Four years later, Davies, Walker and their colleagues at Cleveland-based Notus Labs are getting ready to roll out their technology to development partners — mostly local high school football coaches — this fall. The co-founders are seeking user feedback to help complete their product development so they can start selling their technology next year.
The technology, called Notus Team, uses wearable sensors each about the size of a thick quarter to monitor athletes' vital signs. The sensors wirelessly transmit the data to a dashboard monitored by coaches, trainers and medical staff who watch for signs that athletes may be approaching physical danger, such as heat stroke.
"We've been at this for a little over four years now," said Davies, who is Notus Labs' CEO. "We've been making our device, refining our algorithms, getting all of our software up and running, and we're finally launching (sales), so we're starting the pre-sale process to local teams."
Using technology to ensure athlete safety
Davies, an undergraduate electrical engineering major, and Walker, a graduate biomedical engineering major, met and started working together in the fall of 2019 at a lab run by Colin Drummond, a biomedical engineering professor at the Cleveland university.
Drummond's research interests include using simulation and health-care information technology to support athlete health. He has been working for years to advance the understanding of wearable analytics used to assess human sports performance.
"Most of the work in that lab was working with athletes, establishing what a healthy baseline looks like, how we can get athletes to recover from injury faster, validate that they're really ready to return back to the field," Davies said.
At the lab, Davies and Walker also started working with Dr. James Voos, an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine physician at University Hospitals' Drusinsky Sports Medicine Institute in Beachwood, and his colleague, Dr. Jacob Calcei, a sports medicine physician for the Cleveland-based health system.
Voos also is the head team physician for the Cleveland Browns, and Calcei is a former team physician for the San Francisco 49ers, lending real-world advice to the startup.
In addition, the Notus Labs founders worked with Dr. Ethan Harlow, then a resident physician at University Hospitals. Eventually, Harlow became chief medical officer for Notus Labs.
While doing research at the university lab, Davies and Walker used several devices to monitor the vital signs of clinical trial participants. But wearing five separate sensors is not feasible for everyday athletes and even less so for professional athletes.
A lot of research has been done on predicting athletes' core body temperature noninvasively, but the current method to prevent athlete injuries such as heat stroke is to "just watch the players while they're out on the field and pull them if they start to exhibit symptoms," Davies said.
By that time, it's too late to preemptively treat athletes by cooling them down, Davies said.
"We thought we can make a significant improvement to the sensor hardware by combining all of these things into a single small device," Davies said. "So that's how we got started really looking at athletic performance and safety."
Davies and Walker founded Notus Labs before the end of the fall 2019 semester.
The industry they're entering is growing. According to Mordor Intelligence, the marketplace for wearable devices in sports is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 4.18% in the coming years, reaching $106.47 billion by 2028.
Developing a three-in-one solution
Davies and Walker set about designing a single wearable sensor that could measure three biometrics — heart rate, core temperature and body movements — at the same time.
Notus Labs got started with two federal research grants, including a $256,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Davies said. The company recently closed its pre-seed funding round of $450,000, which Davies said was raised from local angel investors and advisers, as well as the Glide Innovation Fund in Elyria.
Davies and Walker said they are working with a couple of manufacturers to streamline the process of making the sensors, which the two have been making by hand.
Meanwhile, physicians Voos, Calcei and Harlow have been advising the co-founders about the medical side of their technology, which also can be used to rehabilitate athletes after an injury.
"We have a great ecosystem" for developing sports medicine technology in Greater Cleveland, said Walker, who is Notus Labs' chief operating officer. "I think it's pretty underrated. We have some of the greatest health institutes in the world."
Wearable technology such as Notus Team is beginning to help trainers and doctors make the leap from preventing athlete injuries to predicting them, Voos told attendees at the recent Ohio HealthTech Summit.
For instance, he said, the Notus technology could be used to predict cardiac arrest and heat stroke, especially for young athletes.
"The ability of the devices to talk with small-chip technology has really revolutionized our way (of taking) care of athletes," Voos said.
This story has been updated to correctly list Evan Davies' major at Case Western Reserve University.
