With the NHS and social care stretched to capacity and most people wanting to stay at home for as long as possible, we realised from personal experience that many of our homes are now also care environments. We set out to create technology that would keep people out of expensive care facilities, help recovery at home, and to support people to stay safer at home for longer.
Our aim is to give people back the time to make their own choices and put them in control of their own care and data.
Tell me about the business – what it is, what it aims to achieve, who you work with, how you reach customers and so on?
Our award-winning home health monitoring product is used across the NHS, public and private sectors, delivering significant savings to the NHS and social care providers and helping to cut hospital admissions by nearly 50%. It’s the only predictive Al system deployed at home that delivers significant health benefits to its users.
The ethical system (which can’t ‘listen in’ to a person), learns a user’s routine from sensors and algorithms, identifying subtle early change or decline in health and behaviour before a problem occurs and often before the user realises there may be an issue.
Our aim is to prevent a problem, a fall or an admission to hospital before it happens, which is better for the user, their families and the health service.
We work mainly with NHS trusts, health commissioners, local authorities and care providers. Using the AI platform helps to bring a deeper health and wellbeing analysis to the monitoring of their patients. The unique data technology allows carers and healthcare professionals to monitor the underlying patterns and understand the cause and effect of behaviour and movement.
How has the business evolved since its launch? When was this?
The business was founded in 2016. We were quick to get to market with our first contract sold direct to local government in 2018. We now go to market through five reseller partners.
Since early 2018 all our technology and data science has been built in house. We have a multi-disciplined engineering team; including firmware engineers, platform engineers, back-end engineers, front-end engineers and data engineers, and that’s before we get into the data and research function. During this time, sensor technology has moved on significantly and we are now working with some really exciting IoT and WiFi sensing partners to allow us to worry less about data collection and focus on the predictive capabilities of the platform.
Tell us about the working culture at MySense
We’re a tightly-knit, friendly bunch with an ethical ethos and we like to think we have a refreshing, open approach. Perhaps because I am a self-confessed ‘geek’ myself, many of our techie and senior positions are held by women, although we do have a healthy balance of male colleagues also! We pride ourselves on being supportive to all team members and helping each one to reach their full potential.
Our ethical approach is embodied in all that we do and we’re committed to an ethical data policy – we’re a BCorp and a member of the Data For Good Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving public health in an ethical way.
How are you funded?
We have raised £10M since starting MySense in 2016 – with our latest Seed funding round in 2021. We have a handful of key investors and will be looking to get further funding over the next 18 months.
What has been your biggest challenge so far and how have you overcome this?
Honestly the biggest challenge has been and continues to be the complexity of the data problem we’re solving. We have multiple layers of algorithms and AI all orchestrated in a complex dance to ensure we can get the greatest level of understanding around the individuals’ activities and health. We then apply environmental and contextual attributes and then overlay disease models. It’s a data science and data engineering masterpiece, but it needs to be constantly fed and refined to get us closer and closer to certainty with our personalised insights.
How does MySense answer an unmet need?
We know that more people need to be cared for in the community. MySense is a best-in-class product that predicts health decline and deterioration.
The predictive process starts in the home, before any illness or frailty manifests itself, and helps understand the unique characteristics of ageing in each person. Our innovative system utilises advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to track and interpret the data collected, enabling early detection of potential health risks and personalised recommendations for disease management.
Insights expand across a wide range of detail, for example, how the pollen count is affecting someone with COPD and how its sensors can pick up common signs of progression in disease such as MS and Parkinson’s Disease.
What’s in store for the future?
We know that keeping vulnerable, older people out of A&E is part of the government’s long-term strategy and 82 per cent of private health and care providers see technology as part of their response to increasing demand – so we have an opportunity to make a real difference to care provision.
To date we have operated only in the UK, and we’re now exploring other markets. The product is scalable ‘out of the box’, the app, dashboard and help centre are multilingual and multi-timezone and there is a huge, global unmet need.
Looking further ahead, a system could be created to diagnose specific patients’ conditions. This will continue to help doctors to make the right decisions, which could improve the functionality of healthcare systems by combining different technological approaches. The complex systems will better connect between people, practitioners, systems and procedures and the NHS will better utilise the systems.
What one piece of advice would you give other founders or future founders?
This journey is not for the faint hearted. It can be incredibly tough at times so surround yourself with talented people you trust and who you can rely on to give you a boost when you need it. Drive towards a single vision, be relentless in achieving it, but don’t worry too much if the roads you take to get there are different to the ones you thought you’d take.
And finally, a more personal question! What’s your daily routine and the rules you’re living by at the moment?
Well we have three children a dog and a cat, so our routine fits around their schedules and driving this business forward. There is not much time for anything else. That said, we try and sneak in three or four wild camping trips a year, there is something incredibly therapeutic about being under canvas and cooking over a log fire.
Lucie Glenday is the founder of MySense.