Karthik Ramu (left), 17, of Aldie, VA along with their team member, Kushi Sethuram (right), 16, of Aldie, VA are one of this year's competitors in the i.Invest National Youth Business Competition. The team members are the cofounders of AmityConnections, a healthcare startup working to develop a mobile platform that will connect families with the real-time health data of their eldest members so that they may have the continuous ability to monitor their health conditions.
We spoke with Karthik and Kushi to learn more about the business venture:
Tell us about your startup:
AmityConnect is a mobile platform that connects family members with the health of their elders by aggregating real-time health data from smart medical devices onto a single platform accessible to family members at any given time, thus providing them with constant peace of mind. AmityConnect acts as an epicenter for numerous consumer-based smart medical devices that offer open application programming interfaces (e.g. FitBit, Apple Watch, Hexoskin, iHealth, etc.) to third-party developers/companies.
Who or what inspired you to start AmityConnections?
Kushi's grandmother, who had a history of blood clots and respiratory health conditions, would constantly reassure Kushi's mother that she was perfectly fine to not worry her. Her mother bought her grandmother a medical device intended to help monitor her respiratory conditions. Yet, without access to the health data being tracked along with the inability to constantly call her grandmother, who resided on the other side of the globe, the device was not much help. Around 3 years ago, Kushi's grandmother passed away. To this day, Kushi's mother lives with the agonizing thought that if she had more awareness of her mother's health, she could still be alive. Our growing concern for the health of our grandparents in India, coupled with the stories and sorrows from our problem interviews, fueled our goal at AmityConnections of offering proactive and connected healthcare solutions that offer constant peace of mind.
How will AmityConnections impact the world?
Today, family members are unable to connect regularly with the health of their elders due to demands of work, children, marriage, and other socioeconomic factors. Currently, 60% of elders, in the U.S alone, have two or more chronic health conditions (2017 National Health Interview Survey). AmityConnect provides our community's concerned family members with an opportunity to not only monitor, but take proactive and informed decisions regarding the health of their elderly based on aggregated health data. Consequently, the family members in our community can gain a constant peace of mind. AmityConnect can provide family members and caretakers the opportunity to stay connected with the health of their elders and make appropriate and proactive elder care decisions.
What are the next steps?
AmityConnections is seeking seed funding for app development, company formation, marketing, and initial company operations for the first three months. Using the current funds derived from non-equity investments, we have been developing a beta version of the AmityConnect platform. The beta version will be able to aggregate data from a single type of smart medical device (e.g. FitBit HR) and will validate the effectiveness of our data aggregation methods and the peace of mind it offers to family members. We, then, plan on channeling this validation to obtain the previously mentioned seed funding to begin the development of a complete AmityConnect platform that connects to a variety of smart medical devices and is accessible to our entire target market of family members within the U.S.
To learn more about AmityConnections, visit their website, https://amityconnections.com, or Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/AmityConnections. To mentor or offer support, email info@i-investcompetition.com.