Being an entrepreneur is all about hard work and the spirit to battle out odds: Dozee CEO

Speaking to IBNS, Mudit Dandwate, Co-founder and CEO Dozee said, “I was in Frankfurt, Germany for my 24th birthday and the thought that occupied my mind was I needed to create more impact with the high energy years of my life. I looked around and found so many problems that we could solve through our expertise.

"One of them was the complexity of healthcare. I discussed the possibility with Gaurav and we decided to resign from our day jobs and develop a unique health monitor that could capture data placed under the mattress without causing discomfort of wires and electrodes with same precision. What was born as a thought, became a passion and a calling. Soon after we were joined by like-minded folks who believed in the idea and had the same passion and zeal.”

Gaurav Parchani, Co-founder Dozee who left his cushy job at Altair Engineering as a software engineer to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams, explaine: “Our hypothesis was to challenge conventional wisdom, especially consumer health-tech, and provide accurate data. We found that most healthcare devices cannot record stress, heart activity, and sleep cycles with 99 percent accuracy. At best, they offered 75 percent accuracy. We quit their jobs in October 2015, and dived deep with research first approach."

Said Mudit: Globally healtcare spending is projected to increase at an annual rate of 4.1% through 2021, due to an aging and growing population, market, and skilled labour expansion, and rising healthcare costs. These factors create enormous pressure on the existing healthcare system to deliver quality, affordable care to the majority of the Indian population." 

"Just in India, there are more than 160 million elderlies, 30 million sleep apnea patients, 70 million diabetic patients, 4 million cardio-vascular disorder patients who are at high risk but have no means to continuously monitor and manage their health. Current solutions are expensive, inconvenient and hence not feasible to be used especially in a home set-up on a regular basis. Keeping in mind these issues, we have innovated Dozee which effectively performs the functions of a sleep apnea monitor, echocardiography machine, and a multi-parameter monitor seamlessly integrating with the life of the user, as all that they have to do is just sleep."

Dozee is contact-free health monitor. It consists of a thin sheet of MEMS based vibro-acoustic sensors, data accumulation and communication unit, cloud software and mobile phone and web apps. The sensor sheet is placed under the mattress under the chest of the user, it captures micro-vibrations produced by the body every time heart pumps blood, inhalation, exhalation, muscle twitches, tremors or body movements.

These signals are then precisely converted into bio-markers by AI based analytics engine.

Built specifically for home settings, requires no technical expertise to set-up and provides an effective remote monitoring service that enables high-skill medical staff to take decisions remotely.

Dozee’s advanced health intelligence technology identifies the early signs of health deterioration and early intervention saves a great deal of pain and cost to the user. Dozee's advanced algorithms have been trained over billions of data points to achieve 98.4% accuracy in measuring heartbeat and respiration.

Talking about the hardships that are an integral part of the entrepreneurial journey, Mudit said, “Being an entrepreneur is also about facing failures with a smile. No matter who you are, failure will rattle you -- but it’s a stage that any entrepreneur can work past with the right attitude and commitment. Midway in my journey with Dozee, I lost my left arm in a freak accident when I was trying to save my dog in a crocodile attack. But, even that incident made us even more serious about the goal we wanted to achieve."

"The key is to keep going and taking difficulties in your stride, it’s easy if you have right set of people around you,” he added.

Dozee is was launched commercially 6 months back and has saved 35 lives so far by alerting users about health deterioration and helping them detect tuberculosis, arrhythmia, pneumonia, pulmonary edema, cardiac arrest and underdiagnosed conditions such as sleep apnea.

Dozee has recently launched its AI-powered Mindfulness Meditation feature which gives personalized meditation session, based on physiological response. The feature is helping people to de-stress and to improve their quality of sleep.

“We have currently tied up with over 20 hospitals, old-age homes and nursing homes, and plan to launch the product soon in the US while continue. Dozee will continue to evolve in the coming years but the core idea will always be to simplify healthcare, empowering individuals to take charge of their health,” Mudit signed off.

(August 21 marks World Entrepreneurs' Day, a day which aims to create awareness for entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership throughout the world. WED celebrates people around the globe who have chosen to be entrepreneurs to bring about social changes through their innovations.)