Organisation:
EZERX HEALTH TECH PRIVATE LIMITED
Location:
Kolkata, West Bengal
Problem:
Hemoglobin measurement is usually dependent on the services of a well-equipped clinical laboratory. The current gold standard, automated hematology analyzers, uses blood samples for precisely estimating hemoglobin concentration in a laboratory setting. Although this method is effective, it has several drawbacks. Require a high level of technical skills to interpret and at least one drop of blood. Invasive blood sampling is stressful and painful for the patients and results in blood loss, which may induce anemia in infants and infection at the sampling site. In addition, the accuracy of the results is heavily dependent on the skills of the operators
Moreover, haematologyanalyzers are expensive, and the cost per sample is significantly high compared with older manual techniques. To date, the lack of a portable, easily operable, inexpensive, and accurate device has hindered the widespread adaptation of anemia screening in public health programs. Most anemic women live in low-resource areas, where the cost-effective and accurate diagnosis of anemia is unavailable. Although these devices address many problems encountered in older noninvasive devices, they have their own limitations, such as low precision and accuracy. The accuracy and sensitivity of all noninvasive devices vary across races (specifically, skin colour) because of the variation of melanin concentration in skin tissues. Moreover, they are not highly efficient and reliable as they frequently produce erroneous results because of the limitations associated with direct access to the blood or blood vessels and change in tissue morphology, shape, and blood content in the targeted area.
Solution:
To overcome the aforementioned limitations and to realize several crucial functions missing in the current noninvasive devices, we applied a spectroscopic method and addressed many unavoidable requirements that are missing in the previous noninvasive devices. A noninvasive, noncontact, and portable device for hemoglobin estimation, bilirubin measurement and oxygen saturation level at point-of-care in human subjects. Our innovation is based on the measurement of the spectroscopic signal emanating from the vascular bed of the bulbar conjunctiva. As the conjunctiva in all humans is transparent and has white sclera as background, the accuracy and sensitivity of the proposed device are independent of the skin colour of the subjects. The easy access to the conjunctiva and its high vascular visibility ensures that the proposed device has high accuracy and sensitivity.
The proposed device collects the spectroscopic signal of the blood from the human conjunctiva. We choose the conjunctiva of human eyes as the target organ to estimate the hemoglobin concentration as it is easily accessible, hosts well-oxygenated blood containing a high-density vascular bed and has high vascular visibility with a white background in all human subjects. The non-contact nature of our method ensures no change in tissue morphology, shape, or blood content in the target area. These advantages ensure that the proposed device can measure hemoglobin concentration with high accuracy and precision and without any interference from the other pathological conditions in subjects from all races.
Scalability and Impact:
In the current state, we had connected with more than 15 large hospitals, one central government initiative, 2 state government and 10 corporates to showcase out product and showcasing our credibility to do large scale data validation by using their own patient database.
Our primary customers are central and state government, private hospitals and nursing homes, pathology, doctors, micro finance organization, cooperatives, NGO, CSR partner, Primary healthcare providers, school, women collage, old age home, etc.
Our revenue model is very lucrative and consistent. Will sell our product in 50,000 rupees with every month subscription charges to use existing data and reports. Also will provide analytics and so many value added service in future.
By next 3 years we would like to further develop the said product to make it more handy & user friendly and shorten its size further. Apart from that we would like to sell simultaneously rapidly through various channels & earn revenue as much as possible towards create shareholder value.
Financial Requirements:
NA
Awards and Recognition:
1. Tata Social Challenge 2018
2. World’s top 51 impactful startup
3. Indian Oil Startup fund
4. PRAYAS Grant
5. INVENT Grant
6. BIG Grant