Kinsa, an early stage digital health startup, today announced 510(k) clearance for its smartphone-connected thermometer by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
How It Works
Like traditional thermometers, the Kinsa Smart Thermometer can be used orally, under-the-arm or rectally. It’s been designed with parents and children in mind and leverages the smartphone to make taking a temperature a more engaging and informative process. The thermometer connects to a smartphone or other mobile device via the headphone jack and uses the display, power and processing of the smartphone to determine a precise temperature reading — with fewer components in the thermometer, it is compact, thin, and highly flexible, making it more comfortable to use.
Kinsa uses the smartphone’s display screen to provide fun, animated visuals throughout a temperature reading — calming, distracting and engaging children throughout the process. The display also shows reading progress and alerts parents if the thermometer slips out of place. Users can create individual profiles for the whole family and, with a few taps, track their fever, symptom and illness history.
Tracking the Spread of Illness
“With the Kinsa Smart Thermometer, we can transform the way people care for their families. And by piggy-backing off of the most widespread medical behavior in the world — a parent taking a child’s temperature at the first sign of illness, even before scheduling a doctor’s appointment — we can simultaneously create a highly accurate, first-of-its-kind system to track the spread of illness, revolutionizing health across the globe,” said Inder Singh, Founder & CEO of Kinsa.
Children are often the earliest to get sick from a contagious illness like the flu and can spread it rapidly, so a real-time, geo-located understanding of early illness indicators like fever and symptoms, can help to stop the spread.
Kinsa plans to add additional software features and leverage the device as a communication channel with the ill. The NYC based company’s ultimate goal is to create the ‘health weather,’ a real-time understanding of what illnesses are spreading and where. The company will accomplish this by combining data from its products with other sources.
Kinsa will conduct a private beta test of its device and mobile app in early January. The startup has raised $52,000 on Indiegogo in addition to the $2 million in seed funding. Kinsa is currently taking pre-orders for delivery in March or April on its website (www.kinsahealth.com), selling the Kinsa Smart Thermometer initially at a price of $14.99.
