Blood pressure monitoring toilet Casana lands $30M | MobiHealthNews
Casana, a startup building a heart health-monitoring toilet seat, landed $30 million in Series B funding. Morningside led the round with participation from Matrix Partners, General Catalyst and Outsiders Fund.
This news comes roughly a year after the company announced its $14 million Series A funding round. As of today, the company boasts $46 million in capital.
WHAT THEY DO
The company developed the Heart Seat, a toilet seat that is able to capture health metrics over time. The seat is designed to measure a person's blood oxygen level, blood pressure and heart rate. This data is sent to a care team's dashboard, along with overall trends about a patient's health over time.
The device is also able to send a notification to care providers when a patient's metrics are outside of the care team's set parameters. Currently the company is pursuing an FDA clearance for the device. The company is pitching the toilet seat as the first "cuffless blood pressure monitor built into the toilet seat."
In 2019, the company published data in JMIR that demonstrated the product's clinical grade accuracy for measurements of blood pressure, stroke volume and blood oxygenation when compared to the clinical gold standard.
WHAT IT'S FOR
The startup plans to use the new funds to fuel its FDA submission and bring the device to market in 2022.
"The Heart Seat is different from virtually every other vitals monitoring product, in that it takes no time out of your day and works best when you forget it’s even there," Casana CEO Austin McChord said in a statement.
THE LARGER TREND
This isn't the only system looking to monitor a patient's blood pressure without a cuff. Swiss company Aktiia landed $17.5 million in November for its blood pressure monitoring bracelet.
Tech giant Samsung has also released a smart watch with blood pressure measurement capabilities. Additionally Omron Healthcare rolled out a wearable oscillometric wrist watch that measures blood pressure called the HeartGuide wristwatch.
