A digital health company founded to encourage patients to pose questions about their health and use wearables and devices to find answers has embarked on a partnership with fitness tracking business Oura to help people address questions about sleep patterns.
Curious, co-founded by Linda Avey, who also co-founded 23AndMe, crowdsourced questions on healthcare from followers. Sleep dominated the responses. It decided to partner with OURA, a Finnish company that developed a ring which also functions as an activity tracker, to launch a Kickstarter campaign August 18. Within about 24 hours it fulfilled it had exceeded $its 100,000 goal. Its campaign page states that it has raised a little more than $161,700 from 666 backers.
OURA’s wearable device is designed to measure users’ pulse waveform, the time between heart beats, and calculate parameters such as heart rate, respiration rate and their variation over time, according to its website. It also tracks movement and highlights changes in body temperature.
In response to questions posted on its Kickstarter campaign page, an OURA representative responded that it’s developing an open API and an Android app, both of which are expected to be available in the first quarter of 2016. It also has plans for integration with Apple’s Health Kit.
In an emailed company statement, Curious stated that it would collaborate with Oura to get answers to questions such as:
“What affects my sleep more, red or white wine?”
“Why do I wake up feeling unrefreshed?”
“If I cut out caffeine after lunch, does it affect the ratio of the 4 sleep levels?”
“How does hydration affect my sleep?”
“Is the CO2 level in my bedroom impacting how much deep sleep I get?”
It also offered some background on how it came to partner with Ouro:
Over the past few years, we’ve gotten thousands of questions posted on our site, wearecurio.us. A good majority of these questions are about sleep.
So we’ve taken this cue and will be focusing our initial effort on SLEEP.Part of this equation includes the need to accurately track four levels of sleep (deep, light, REM, awake). We’ve been testing all the various wearables, mattress sensors, and room monitors on the market that track some level of sleep. We hadn’t found anything that satisfied our criteria. And then we were introduced to ?ura, a stylish ring that captures not only the four levels of sleep, but also tracks your activity during the day, with sophisticated algorithms designed to calculate your nightly recovery and readiness for a new day. We’ve found the perfect partner.
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A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
