Digital health startups to watch:
Casana

Once you get past the jokes about a toilet seat that checks your vitals, it’s easy to see how Casana’s Heart Seat could save lives from hypertension.

The FDA recently cleared Heart Seat for home heart monitoring. and plans to expand to systolic and diastolic blood pressure monoriting sometime this year. The seat collects data when in use and uploads it to the cloud for review by a healthcare provider.

When you sit down and think about it, is there a better way to get daily measurements of blood pressure, heart rate and oxygen saturation?

“The healthcare system has been searching for this actionable intelligence for decades, and it turns out, we were sitting on a great idea all along,” the company said in announcing the FDA clearance.

Adherence is a major obstacle for patients with chronic conditions, especially hypertension patients. That’s why device developers like Medtronic have dumped so much time and energy into renal denervation and other potential treatments to relieve patients of the burden of testing and remembering medication schedules.

Casana is seeking volunteers to test the tech on their own thrones at home ahead of a market launch sometime this year.

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