The Founder
Senthil Kumar, co-founder, and CEO of Jiovio Healthcare is exceptionally passionate about innovations with technology and hence launched his startup to provide end-to-end solutions for maternal care.
Senthil finished his graduation from Anna University and kickstarted his career as a software engineer at Aricent Technologies. He is an insatiable reader of engineering literature and also an avid product builder. For this reason, he was employed by the likes of Samsung and Qualcomm. A keen innovator at heart, he is doing the best of his abilities for providing the best personalized maternal care.
What is Jiovio Healthcare?
Jiovio healthcare is a platform that provides one of the best end -to -end personalized medical services. Their solutions ensure the availability of high-quality maternal care for mothers in remote places. The company does this with the help of AI, IoT, and wearable technology.
- They designed an easy way to gather critical maternal data digitally.
- Their products can be linked to a mobile application via which all the collected data can be stored and used to give home-based maternal care.
- Thus, the company ensures that one can collect all the required data with minimal resources without any workforce.
Solutions developed by the company:
- Allowear: It is a wearable device that will continuously track your activities, sleeping routing. Additionally, it will also remind you about your medicines and checkups.
- AlloTricorder: It is an IoT based kit that measures six vital pieces of information in a single device, which further sends the data over to the cloud for analytics.
- AlloBeat: It is a safe, non-invasive, and completely natural way of listening to your baby’s heartbeat. No waves are used in this process. It uses a doppler based method to monitor the fetal heart rate. Isn’t that amazing!
- AI Assistance: It is an AI-based personal assistant to detect the high-risk patient and alert the doctors.
To know more about their solutions and services, check out the company page on Hiredd.com here- https://hiredd.com/c/jiovio-healthcare
The Vision, Idea, and Inspiration!
Just to let you know, the ratio of a gynecologist to pregnant women in India is 1:1000 as per WHO. Senthilkumar intends to bridge this gap with his startup.
He got the idea from his personal experiences. He lived away from the hospitals. Consequently, his wife had to wait for hours for a simple consultation from the gynecologist. He saw his wife struggle with her meeting and advisory session. He thus decided to design a quick prototype of a wearable device and medical kit that can collect all the essential information digitally and forward it to the doctors for feedback.
In sum, the vision of the company is to treat every person medically and make the entire medical process fast and digitalized.
All they want is that no women should die while giving birth.
Challenges that they faced on the outset!
They, too, faced many challenges in their initial days, unlike any other startup.
Technical Challenges:
- The initially planned device required a battery recharge once a month. But soon, they realized that the device wasn’t collecting any information after a while. When they looked into the matter, they found that the women were unable to understand the recharging cycle of the device. To overcome this, they made several optimizations and managed to increase the battery life from one month to 9 months.
- Secondly, they faced the issues of zero/poor internet connectivity in the regions where the device was deployed. For this reason, they developed a mobile app that stored the data offline and sent it to the cloud when the internet was available.
- Initially, the company developed six different IoT based hardware devices to measure vitals. But when the team went to the villages, they realized that the machines were too heavy to carry. Therefore, they decided to make a portable version by fitting all the six devices into one. Subsequently, a portable device smaller than a mobile was made.
Other Obstacles:
They also faced a usual problem. After a while, the company apprehended that the data sent to the doctors wasn’t correct. On investigating, they found out that the husbands sometimes wore those watches without knowing that their vitals are being sent to the doctors. To solve this, they designed a device that is a form of wearable jewelry so that only the would-be mother can wear them.
Collaborations and Partnerships of the company!
Jiovio Healthcare joined hands with Amrita SeRVE to implement ”Project SaveMom” in nearly 100 villages all across the country. Dr. Uma Nair helped them with this. She is an NRI from the USA with a Ph.D. and MD Degree in medical science. She appointed a team to implement this project.
Some other supporters of the company include Google Launchpad India, Nasscom CoE IoT, FICCI, UNICEF, USAID, AIRMAKER, etc.
First Milestone and Current Status Growth!
The first milestone that Jiovio achieved was the successful completion of the Pilot Project within 24 villages between Ooty in Tamil Nadu and Wayanad in Kerala. The project embraced 1,400 pregnant women until the end of 2018.
When we asked the Senthil about the startup’s first achievement, he said:
“It was the first time in many decades that a tribal woman in Wayanad gave birth to a baby boy weighing 3.1 kilograms.”
As of now, 1428 mothers delivered healthy babies in 70 Tribal Villages in Kerala and Maharashtra with Jiovio’s care. The company had collaborated with the Tamil Nadu Government to monitor and support people under quarantine in nine districts of the state.
