🔒Startup leverages mobile tech for home care

As the new CEO of Loon Medical Inc., a medical device startup founded in Tolland, George Panciera can relate to his target consumers. He knows firsthand — like many Baby Boomers — the challenges of playing caregiver to an aging parent determined to stay in his or her home, often unattended.

“My siblings and I cared for our 95-year-old father who wanted to remain in his home of 60 years,” Panciera said. But outside of hiring expensive around-the-clock home care, which his father did not want, Panciera noted, it was difficult to monitor his dad's safety.

He hopes his company's new product suite — expected to launch this month — will help others with similar family situations. Loon Medical's blue-tooth enabled medical devices will include a sensor for chairs and beds that not only collect and store data about an elderly client's movements and behaviors, but can also send alerts to caregivers. Call it home care 2.0.

“Our product is differentiated by its connectivity to mobile technology,” Panciera said. “Most competitors offer a single product, like a chair, that may send out a sound if a person moves from it, but a caregiver needs to be physically present [to hear the alert].” Loon Medical's suite — which also includes a toilet sensor and sensor to track incontinence planned for release in 2016 — allows a caregiver to monitor someone remotely.

While technology-enabled home health care currently accounts for only about 3 percent of national healthcare spending — an estimated $68 billion — it is projected to grow at nearly 9 percent annually, according to a report by consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

The reason for that growth is the combination of a population that is both aging and saturated with mobile technology, said Heidi Douglas, who co-founded Loon Medical 18 months ago with her husband, Joel. In fact, according to U.S. Census figures, between now and 2050, the number of Americans over age 65 is expected to nearly double to 83.7 million. And with life-expectancies increasing, people are playing the role of caregiver for longer periods of times.

“There are many adult children who are caring now for both parents and grandparents, in addition to their kids,” Douglas said. “It's a real sandwich generation.”

As healthcare costs get less concentrated in clinics and hospitals and medical devices and diagnostic equipment evolves, the home-based healthcare market is expected to grow significantly.

While the market opportunity is huge, Douglas said, the company needed to start small. With $485,000 in funding from Connecticut Innovation's (CI) Bioscience Innovation Fund, Loon Medical has developed nearly 1,500 units of its main product suite for its initial launch.

“The CI funding was critical to us and helped us develop our prototypes, develop software and our cloud-based platforms,” Douglas said.

Douglas said Loon Medical, which recently moved to Norwich, is collaborating with a few homecare organizations in Connecticut to continue to gather additional information and feedback about her products. “We have no doubts about [our product suite's] reliability,” she said, noting Loon Medical is an FDA-licensed manufacturer. “But we want to learn from our clients and our analytics.”

It is those detailed cloud-stored analytics, contends Panciera, that provides the real benefit of Loon Medical's technology. “It helps to show caregiver's patterns of behavior and at an affordable cost,” he said. The chair and bed sensors will retail for $150 and are durable enough to last about a year.

While Panciera is bullish on the company's launch — he expects the initial suite to bring in around $1.5 million in 2016 and double the following year — he knows cash flow is needed to grow the company and expand its product line. The company will be launching a crowdfunding campaign to raise awareness and funds this fall, but Loon is also targeting angel investors for larger-scale investments. “We're hoping to raise $1.5 to $2 million,” Panciera said.

That additional funding will be used to continue development of its products, which Joel Douglas, a co-founder, hopes to expand beyond mobile-connected sensors that track movements. “We'd like to [eventually] develop products that can help people [remotely] monitor physiological things like glucose levels and temperature,” he said.

Panciera said he'd like to grow the company and product line so it can be acquired by a larger company. That, he says, will potentially help make Loon Medical's home health technology available to a much broader — and aging — population that he knows firsthand will need it.

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