This startup offers a non-invasive wearable that can monitor pregnant women and prevent stillbirths

Bengaluru-based Empathy Design Labs, founded by Shivi Kapil, has designed Kriya, a wearable device for daily monitoring of pregnancy. The IoT-embedded product provides alerts and suggestions to expecting parents for timely action.

Wednesday August 28, 2019 , 5 min Read

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there are 136 million pregnancies every year and about three million pregnancies turns into stillbirths. And 4.2 million women are currently suffering from depression association with their stillbirths.

What can be done to bring this alarming figure down? What can be done to provide better pre-natal healthcare to women and continuously monitor a pregnant woman’s health?

This is where Empathy Design Labs comes in. Founded by Shivi Kapil, it has designed Kriya, a non-invasive and wearable monitor for daily monitoring of pregnancy that provides alerts and suggestions to expecting parents for timely action. The IoT-embedded product monitors foetal and maternal parameters. The data is analysed by a proprietary algorithm, based on which alerts are sent to the app about the health of the mother and the baby. If any anomaly is detected, the device sends an alert, prompting the patient to seek healthcare from the nearest hospital. In the case of a possible stillbirth, Kriya can detect abnormalities and send an update at least 24 hours earlier.

Designing for better lives

Shivi calls herself a “human-centred” designer by passion and profession. After completing her bachelor’s course in electronics engineering and getting a master’s degree in design from the National Institute of Design, she received an offer to work for a leading global medical device company.

Of the experience, she says,

“I learnt the most there as I got to work with some of the most brilliant minds in the field. I worked there for almost four years and quit in January 2015 with no backup plan. My only thought was that I wanted to do something different to bring change to people’s lives.”

Though Shivi was getting many lucrative job offers, she chose consulting with international development organisations as a design researcher.

In June 2015, Shivi participated in a healthcare hackathon designed by CAMTECH - USAID for family planning where more than 700 people participated on healthcare themes and her idea won. After that, she got selected for the MIT D lab-sponsored fellowship programme in July 2015 .While she was finishing this, BIRAC launched a fellowship program called SIIP and she applied for it with the support of Villgro.

“This opportunity turned my life around. This fellowship was 18 months long and I got six months to travel to observe and identify problems in maternal and child care in India. I went to tribal , rural , suburban, and urban locations of India and met literally everyone in this space - pregnant parents, family members, ANMs , ASHA, nurses, obstetricians, traditional midwives, medical device technicians, biomedical engineers and even hospital sweepers,” she says.

In the course of her work, Shivi also met mothers who were going through the trauma of stillbirth, and nurses and doctors who had no way to identify the risk other than physical palpation around the pregnant belly.

Challenges and happy moments

Kriya device — The Kriya wearable device

Soon after completing the SIP Fellowship in 2016, Shivi started Empathy Design Labs and says she now gets to do what she loves the most: identifying problems and designing to solve those problems. The company was registered in 2017, and soon won a big grant with C-Camp as managing partner.

Though she began on the startup journey alone, she was later joined by her sister Dr Chaitali, who is CEO and CTO of the company and looks at the clinical aspect.

“We are a team of human-centric designers, researchers, and engineers. We also have advisers who support us on clinical , technical and business aspects of the solution.”

Kriya is expected to roll out by early next year. “The happy moment for us was when we got our first individual customer who had a stillbirth in the past and was willing to pay for our product,” she adds.

The startup is incubated at Nasscom coe-IOT Lab and works from their co-working space. It has also exhibited the innovation in Ottawa, Canada, as part of the same network under AICTE- India-Canada Accelerator in September 2018. Empathy Design Labs is also supported by AIC Banasthali as part of their Womenpreneur programme.

Its business model is B2G and revenue will be generated through direct sales to government and partners.

“Designing a medical device was not easy as the process is regulated. It takes a lot of user research, technology, design thinking, business development, and, most importantly, patience and ethics to design for people which can save their lives. Designing for doctors is easier than designing for parents. Waiting for clinical and ethical approval was really challenging as startups are time expensive. Putting in money from our own pockets when we waited for grants was a challenge,” Shivi explains.

The immediate focus is to cover five Indian states in the beginning and reach over 50,000 mothers within the first two-three years. Within five years, she hopes to up the standard of care for antenatal foetal monitoring and protect 20 million pregnant mothers and babies and stillbirths cumulatively, and seven million per year thereafter worldwide.

“I remember something said by a Masterchef, “I search about what is impossible and then I chase it… because when we chase and try to do something impossible, we will surely come up with something which is brilliant and innovative’. This is my watchword,” Shivi says.

(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)