Health IT, Startups

Kinsa Health raises Series A to tap big data potential of smartphone-enabled thermometer

Kinsa Health has been building up support for a low cost thermometer it developed with […]

Kinsa Health has been building up support for a low cost thermometer it developed with a big data component. Its mission to use its device to collect big data to improve population health got some financial validation with the company’s $9.6 million Series A. It will use the funding to add more staff to help its FDA-approved, smartphone-enabled thermometer collect more meaningful data for public health applications.

Kinsa raised the funds from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, FirstMark Capital, serial entrepreneur Andy Palmer, and other investors.

Supplementing aggregate temperature and symptom data with other health data from CDC or Google Flu, for example, Kinsa wants to provide insights to users about what’s going around schools and communities.

The longterm goal is to set up a way for users to join groups and track illnesses in their neighborhoods, schools and offices.

“We’ve reimagined the world’s most common medical device, the thermometer, and given it the potential to improve the health of entire communities,” a company statement read. “This supports our mission to create the first real-time map of human health using mobile technologies in order to track – and stop – the spread of illness,” said Inder Singh, founder and CEO of the business.

Thermometers as big data tool were part of a broader profile of devices including wearables designed to collect data partly to improve public health at the mHealth Summit. At the Venture+Forum Pitch session, Prima-Temp snagged the top prize. The company seeks to work with companies in the fertility market such as Glow or Ovuline, but it also sees opportunities in early disease detection.

In his keynote, John Brownstein of Boston Children’s Hospital referenced its work on Thermia. It is a decision-support tool for parents centered on taking children’s temperature and help guide them if their child has a fever. It is intended to educate parents about potential underlying causes of the fever and other symptoms and to give information on supportive treatment that parents can deliver at home. But the big data component involves using de-identified data from the project to track disease and better understand population health.

In response to emailed questions, Inder Singh, founder and CEO of Kinsa Health said what’s missing from some approaches to tracking illness outbreaks is real-time, highly geo-located, medically-accurate data taken in the context of someone who has just fallen ill.

“We provide this through our thermometer and app. We believe that a little bit of our data can help to overcome challenges in the other data sets, and taken together, the ability to track is much MUCH better.”

He also highlighted what he called limitations of some companies that leverage social media mining and search query data for flu terms. “They provide early data from people in their homes, before people enter the healthcare system. However, these approaches also suffer from limitations in geo-location and natural language processing (NLP): one oversimplification is that ‘Bieber Fever’ is clearly not a flu term. Additionally, a NY Times article on the flu will create a spike in Google search queries on flu throwing Google Flu trends off.

He added: “The thermometer is the very first tool a person uses to confirm an illness, and it happens to be highly used by a population of major ‘spreaders’ of illness… as any parent knows, children get sick often and spread it. So we provide early, medically-accurate data from someone who has just-fallen-ill. We “piggy back” on this most common behavior — using a thermometer when one first falls ill — to help a user get better faster (through features in our app), while simultaneously aggregate data to improve society’s ability to track flu and other illnesses.”

 

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