Company Profile:
Respi
"Respi helps people with chronic respiratory diseases (such asthma and COPD) regulate their medication and avoid asthma attacks. Respi analyzes the user's lung condition through a smartphone-enabled spirometer, defines the user's current pulmonary function baseline and provides immediately quantified health feedback. Users can determine drug efficacy, severity of asthma attacks and communicate wirelessly their measurements to their healthcare provider. The demographics of respiratory disease are huge and expanding: it is currently the 3rd killer in the western world and 1 in 8 people has some type of chronic respiratory disease. It is by body construction that no two people have the same lungs yet they are being treated as such. Respiratory patients face uncertainty over their condition, as there are poor metrics other than “how they feel”. Patients unable to track progress are prone to avoidable asthma exacerbations, whereas physicians who measure their patients’ health at every visit are unable to optimize user treatment. Respi introduces accurate measurements when the users need them and advanced metrics that transform the complicated spirometry measurements into actionable advice.
Q: What single word or phrase best describes the culture of your startup and why?
A: Innovating at every single step. Our engineering backgrounds allow us to
solve problems with resources and constraints. Respi is comprised of a
syndicate of people with high aptitude in our domain of expertise and
complementary fields of knowledge. The team is bound by common values
and commitment to the goal, resulting in exciting dynamics that augment
the utility of hierarchy in managing innovation.
Q: Five years from now, what would you like to be able to say has been your most important contribution to health?
A: Respi aspires to make patient-generated data feedback the golden
standard in respiratory disease management. We hope that physicians will
advise patients to actively take control of their health and that
patients will have a powerful tool that promotes healthy habit changes
and a drug optimization method. The stream of patient-generated personal
health data is expected to bring a significant advancement in our
understanding of disease and will result in big data analytics that will
bring novel metrics to measuring drug efficacy.
Q: How will it help people live to their greatest potential or contribute to making the world healthier?
A: 1 in 8 people lives with pulmonary disease and 1 in 12 die due to it.
Every pulmonary disease patient receives a generic treatment tailored to
the average patient, as opposed to a personalized regime. Respi enables
patients to create their own rich pulmonary profile and use it for
optimizing treatment. Patients will be able to track the effectiveness
of their medication regime, avoid exacerbation factors, and prevent
asthma attacks by understanding symptoms at the onset. Physicians will
now have the data to track individual medication efficacy and optimize
the medication regime on the types of drugs, quantity and schedule,
resulting in patients using less and more effective drugs.
Q: What's the most inventive, innovative, or disruptive aspect of your initiative?
A: Respi empowers patients through medical data acquisition, analytics, and
data driven medication, with minimal disruption to their daily regime
at at minimum cost. And it enables physicians to expand their
understanding of the patient’s respiratory function in order to design a
personalized treatment appropriate to the respiratory function of the
particular patient.
Q: Please tell us how your business idea was conceived. Was there an "aha" moment or did it evolve gradually?
A: The formation of our company was a serendipitous alignment of
situations. Our founders attended the same University in Greece, where
they were connected through the IEEE Student branch and discussed the
possibility of starting a business. They both studied biomedical
engineering to different extents and went on to pursue divergent
careers, gathering experience from diverse industries, only to converge
years later. When our co-founder Antonios was a consultant for a naval
construction and repair company in Muscat, Oman, he gave a fancy
windmeter as a gift to the company's CEO. When the CEO started playing
with it in the office, an epiphany about measuring lung vivacity came to
Christos, our second founder. He shaped a proposition and they jumped
into a venture immediately.