Article preview from Start-Up - December, 2011
Awarepoint, a New Leaf Venture’s portfolio companies, has adapted mobile IT to create a real-time tracking and location system that can help hospitals save money by running more efficiently while also increasing revenue.
Article preview from Start-Up - December, 2011
In the venture capital industry, it used to be that when someone said a medical device company had a technology in search of an application, that was a bad thing. It meant that millions of dollars would be sunk into product development before a certain market had materialized. The mobile technology industry is turning that paradigm around. Vijay Lathi, managing director at New Leaf Ventures says, “Here we can define the problem and then draw from off-the shelf technologies.” In the case of Awarepoint Corp., one of New Leaf’s portfolio companies, it has borrowed from other industries to create a real-time tracking and location system that can help hospitals save money by running more efficiently while also increasing revenue.
Awarepoint was founded in 2004, built on an idea that didn’t pan out. The company thought to use wireless technology to help parents find lost children in amusement parks. Awarepoint turned to Wi-Fi to connect and locate people, but because of the existing limitations of Wi-Fi, battery life and other technologies, it didn’t work. The Navy got wind of what Awarepoint was doing, however, and asked the company to develop a system to help it keep track of equipment at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. The hospital had a difficult time locating equipment when it was needed, costing time, manpower and money as people searched for equipment or the hospital incurred an extra rental expense to replace equipment that was deemed “lost.”
By 2006, Awarepoint was able to draw on existing radiofrequency emitting/detecting tags and sensors and ZigBee, a wireless communication standard that connects local RF transmitting and receiving devices. (ZigBee is a sort of simpler, less expensive counterpart to BlueTooth; ZigBee is used to connect simpler types of devices within personal area networks – for example, within the boundaries of a hospital.) These technologies had been adopted by other industries in which it was necessary to track the location and movement of assets (large retailers like Walmart) or the interaction of devices (smart energy; connecting electric meters and power-consuming devices).
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