Athelas[1] is launching a low-cost, blood diagnostics device today made for testing certain diseases like the flu, bacterial infections and cancer in the comfort of your home.
Tanay Tandon founded the startup in 2014 at the tender age of 17 to develop a smartphone device that could detect malaria through blood samples. That idea proved difficult but the idea of ease and mobility stuck with him.
Athelas’ new device, which looks like a larger version of an Amazon Echo, is meant for patients to check their blood diagnostics in the comfort of their home.
However, instead of giving it voice commands and getting answers, you stick a slide with your blood on it inside the device to find out if your white blood cell count is off. This is particularly useful for discovering infections and inflammation in the body, and could be helpful to those with cancer.
Tandon and his co-founder Deepika Bodapati, have backgrounds in computer vision, machine learning and molecular imaging and were part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2016 class.
The core business model is built on working with oncologists who loan the device out to patients while they are on a regimen. This saves them time and the hassle of needing to go into a lab or doctor’s office and give a blood sample as they can simply do the blood test at home every day.
Touted as a simple blood test for anyone, anywhere, the device uses computer imaging to run rapid blood diagnostics from one drop of a patient’s blood and then delivers results in 50 seconds through the corresponding Athelas app (on both Android and iOS).
From there information can be sent back to the doctor to check on important markers...
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