Note: I had stopped writing posts in 2017. Slowly getting back into it in 2024, mostly for AI.

Sandalbay Life

Jul 7, 2012 | Patient's Tools

The personal wearable-sensor devices trickle that started with FitBit around 2008 is now starting to look like a flash flood. For every one offering that has got media love (like Basis), there are perhaps five other being incubated (like Node).

It’s an embryonic market, and one that is tackling complex health problems with commoditized sensor technology. Every smart inventor in a garage seems to be capable of doing something about it. So a few things are bound to start happening now:

  • Event Managers will take notice. Exhibit A: Quantified Self Conference
  • Doubts on where does this lead us or what we learn
  • Hardware and software platforms that unify the myriad devices start sprouting

Sandalbay Life exemplifies the last. It’s is a young startup (started last last year) at LA-based accelerator StartEngine. Not much information out there about details of the offering, but their aim is to provide a single software platform for manufacturers to leverage. Given the device and format proliferation, it makes sense that someone should try to manage the complexities of dealing with application and network security, cross-platform performance and reliability issues, etc.

“Providing the white-labeled consumer software for manufacturers to utilize”, as Sandalbay Life founder Neil Malhotra puts it in an interview, is smart, since so many of these offerings are from small players. But the big guys are noticing it too. Qualcomm’s 2net platform is going to be close competition. It too, is a cloud-based system designed to be universally-interoperable with different medical devices and applications and provide easy access to the aggregated data.

I’m also not sure how to align it with other platform approaches that are already out there. Biggest one being Microsoft Healthvault. Healthvault may not be white-labeled, but does provides a way for device manufacturers to contribute their data to a PHR. They do have API’s that let a developer get to the unified Healthvault data. Plus they have a fast-growing ecosystem of devices and apps that are integrated with it.

There are smaller, but committed players going at the aggregation value proposition from multiple angles: Digifit (cardio), WellDoc (disease management) for example. Open-source grassroots projects (OpenYou, Cosm, LockerProject, Sen.se) are surfacing too.

The play for sensor manufacturers to have a common platform for reducing their development cost is valid. Remaining value propositions (single app for consumers, unifying data from multiple devices, giving providers tools to create workflows and insights, etc.) all come with crushing competition. Plus the whole field of personal wellness tracking is too nascent – we need the devices to take a hold in the mass market before aggregating platforms truly become a viable business themselves.

2017 update: Sometime in the last few years, Sandalbay Life has recalibrated its offering to be more about wellness training programs. More about services than data aggregation.