Chronolife Announces Funding, Launch of Biometric Smart Shirt

French technology company Chronolife has announced the commercial launch of Nexkin, a smart shirt equipped with 10 biometric sensors, as well as funding from investment fund iBionext, French insurance company Adrea and Swiss family office Celeste Management, though the amount secured was not disclosed.

Nexkin uses the biometric sensors onboard to monitor six physiological indicators — heart rate, abdominal and thoracic breathing, body temperature, physical activity and pulmonary impedance — with the aim of managing chronic conditions and preventing further injuries. The smart shirt is machine washable, and the data collected from its sensors is sent to a smartphone via Bluetooth where it is fed through Chronolife’s algorithms to create actionable insights that can be used by health professionals to better understand and manage any ongoing issues the wearer is experiencing.

“The Nexkin T-shirt makes accurate, unobtrusive continuous health monitoring both affordable and convenient across a wide range of industries and functionalities, from pharmaceutical testing to senior care,” Laurent Vandebrouck, chief executive of Chronolife, said in a statement.

“By combining wearable electronics with advanced AI-powered analytics, we’re delivering biometric monitoring capabilities that will revolutionize the way researchers and healthcare professionals interact with patients,” he added.

Smart garments are a growing trend in digital health, with Juniper Research projecting them to be one of the fastest growing segments of the smart wearables market by the year 2020.

Though the market for these wearables hasn’t reached the mainstream yet, John Nosta, digital health enthusiast and NOSTALAB president said in a statement to MobiHealthNews that the data gathered from Nexkin’s sensors and what Chronolife’s AI does with the data they collect can make a big impact on the industry.

“Our ability to connect the physiologic dots and develop unique and powerful insights as a function of several easily acquired data sources can be a real game changer for medicine and digital health,” Nosta said. “In the future, physiologic data will be acquired at a distance with no contact with your body or skin.”

Chronolife is planning to obtain medical certification for Nexkin in Europe, as well as FDA clearance in the U.S., in addition to the FCC clearance and CE marking it received earlier this year. 

Source: MobiHealthNews, Vator

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December 13, 2019 – by Tony Bitzionis