Fertility kits have more takers in non-Tier 1 cities says monitor-maker Inito; develops device for chronic diseases 

A Bengaluru-based medical technology startup Inito is riding on the wave of demand for at-home-diagnostic test services. It has been founded in 2015 by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) alumni Aayush Rai and Varun AV and a team of engineers, scientists and doctors with past experience at IIT’s, Siemens, NASA, Narayana Healthcare and Samsung. Rai and Varun have developed their first smart medical device – the fertility monitor which is a home diagnostic test. It enables women to track their fertile days in the confines of their home. The device and a pack of 8 fertility test strips costs Rs 2,699. How it works Speaking about the working of the monitor to Firstpost, Aayush Rai said, “the user needs to dip the test strips in urine and insert them into the reader. By reading the strip, the app gets the value of the hormones leteinizing (LH) & estrogen (E3G) and looks at the trends of these over days to predict each women’s unique fertility rating. The algorithm is also intelligent to automatically adapt to the user’s cycles and works even if the cycles are irregular.” [caption id=“attachment_5302211” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Team Inito[/caption] The fertility monitor was commercially launched in December 2017. “About 6,000 tests are done on the Inito Device every month and the number is growing at 25-30 percent every month,” claims Rai, adding 40 percent of sales come from non-metro cities. Changing disease patterns Inito was founded when Varun and Aayush realised that disease patterns in the country are changing and that increasing urbanisation, sedentary lifestyle and bad food habits are leading to a distressing amount of non-communicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease, infertility, thyroid etc. “These conditions require regular monitoring using diagnostic devices. So we started Inito to build the next generation of home diagnostic devices that can be used to monitor one’s body and use the data to achieve health goals.” According to World Health Organisation, the prevalence of chronic diseases is expected to rise by 57 percent by 2020. A large percentage of these conditions can be prevented or managed by regular monitoring and simple lifestyle changes. The company’s patent-pending ‘Flat Lens’ technology allows a user to test for glucose, thyroid, cholesterol etc. all on a single portable device using a smartphone app. It will soon be adding diabetes, thyroid and vitamin D tests to its device and which is expected to be launched by Q2 2019. The company has raised $1 million from angel investors in India and Singapore last year. It is looking to raise further capital and expand to South East Asian markets by the end of this year. “We expect that every middle class and above household in India will have an Inito like diagnostic device at home by 2020. We want our device to be in 10 million households by 2020,” Rai said. The firm is planning to go international towards the end of 2019.