Our goal is to be able to constantly and consistently monitor a patient's blood pressure in a safe, secure, and reliable way, all while maintaining contact with the patient's physicians and providers.
Customer Validation
Complications with blood pressure involves a massive group of participants. Seventy-five million people in the U.S. have high blood pressure and only 54 percent of those people have their high blood pressure under some control[1]. Our product will not only entail to those struggling with maintaining a healthy blood pressure, but also to those who just want to make sure that they are continuing a healthy lifestyle. The twenty specific customers we would contact to validate our design would be: physicians, physician assistants, primary care doctors, cardiologists, nurse practitioners, patients with blood pressure problems, healthy patients, patients with diabetes, cardiologists, nephrologists, Mayo Clinic, Aetna, Assurant, AmeriHealth, athletic designers, app designers, Medtronic, American Public Health Organization, Johnson and Johnson, and General Electric Company.
Competitors
We do have strong competitors like Fitbit, Omron, Apple Watches, and Qardio Arm. However, our product differs in some unique and important ways.
Advantages
The reason why most of the products made by our competitors are successful is because of their aesthetics's. They appeal too younger generations, work very smoothly and efficiently, they contain a large LED screen, have a watch-like shape, and an app that goes along with it. With such a technologically advanced society we live in, these products tend to fit right in to the consumers' wants for tech-savvy items.
Disadvantages
While our product values some of the advantages of our competitors, such as being visually appealing, technological and simple, we tend to differ in important ways. Our competitors' products lack one thing: privacy. They all have a big flashy LED screen that can display all of the consumer's personal information which can be a problem. We plan to make our product skin thin with a system that delivers the consumers information to an app rather than having their personal information being shown on an LED screen. This will allow the consumer to be aware of their blood pressure but in a safe and private way. In addition, many of our competitors lack the concept of having constant communication between the healthcare providers and customers. Our product plans to feature a constant alert and communication notion between the two sides.
IP Position
We strongly believe we have a high IP position. Our product will involve a skin thin material that can remain discreet at all times and send information from the "bracelet" to a mobile device via an app or text alerts. The difference in our product from all of the other products will be in the detection method of blood pressure levels, the important privacy and secrecy processes and development, and communication between the patient and physician. We know our product differs in unique and special ways, and we know that this kind of technology can be done due to Stanford's recent pulse recording product[2]. The four most important patents found relating to our device were these:
1.) Fluorescence blood pressure bracelet- CN 205795676 International Classification: A61B/021:This device is a "blood pressure bracelet of fluorescence demonstration . . . . a kind of blood pressure burning light bracelet" [3]
2.) Intelligent ultrasonic blood pressure monitoring bracelet- CN 105662381 A International Classification: A61B5/00: This bracelet is said to provide an "intelligent ultrasonic blood pressure monitoring bracelet which is worn on the wrist of a monitored person" [4]
3.) Electronic bracelet for reminding heartbeat and blood pressure state- CN 104997497 A International Classification: A61B5/024: This bracelet is said to " send out warning information when heartbeat and blood pressure monitoring values exceed preset values" [5]
4.)Noninvasive sensing detection bracelet- CN 104688204 A International Classification: A61B5/0205 : This bracelet is said to be "a blood pressure detection mechanism, a pulse detection mechanism and a wireless communication module" [6]
BME 100 Fall 2017
