According to WHO (World Health Organisation), the human body needs a minimum of eight hours of sleep a night to feel refreshed and ready to take on all daily tasks ahead. Having said that, approximately, one in five people struggle to get through the day because of the sleep disorder. In fact, Sleep-related health issues are rapidly becoming one of the biggest healthcare challenges
Sleep – hailed as a frontier for holistic wellness
As sleep deprivation rises, companies are capitalizing on the trend and exploring new opportunities. With digitisation, sleep tech is becoming a flourishing business with many innovative and forward-thinking sleep products promising to help consumers improve their sleeping patterns.
Onera Health, a spin-off from imec and Holst Centre competes with the current expensive and inconvenient gold standard solutions for detecting sleep disorders by packing better sensing hardware and advanced algorithms in a fully disposable medical device.
Patch technology!
In this regard, Onera Health, a leader in sleep diagnostic solutions and services, announced it raised $9.3M (approx €8.16M) in Series A funding led by Jazz Pharmaceuticals, imec.xpand, as well as other investors including imec and BOM.
With R&D offices in the Netherlands, the company will use this fund to revolutionise sleep diagnostics with the world’s first at-home medical grade sleep diagnostic patch system.
“We believe the solutions Onera Health are developing could transform diagnostic and treatment-monitoring processes in sleep medicine,” said Jed Black, M.D., Senior Vice President, Sleep and CNS Medicine at Jazz Pharmaceuticals.
Breakthrough sleep testing solutions
For the unknown, Onera focuses on breakthrough sleep testing solutions with two simple patches instead of sensors usually attached to the face, scalp, chest and limbs.
Founded by Pieter Ermers, Ruben de Francisco and Soukaina Adnane, the patch technology will benefit doctors with accurate test results matching the conventional in-lab sleep clinics while patients will rest easier being monitored at home or in a medical setting suggested by their doctor. The test can be performed by the patient and the data will be stored on the machine, which will be analyzed at the sleep clinic later.
“Thanks to our technology partnership with imec, our medical-grade, disposable patches will accurately diagnose sleep-related ailments in the comfort of a patient’s own bed and using it will be as simple as putting on a band-aid.”, says, Co-Founder & CEO, Raphael Michel.
Resolving pain-points!
Headquartered in California’s Silicon Valley, Onera’s goal is to resolve these pain-points through the development and use of its sleep diagnostics service model. Raphael Michel added, “For far too long, people avoided searching for those answers because understanding their issues was expensive, inconvenient or unreliable.”
Moreover, the home sleep testing is becoming popular in Europe with a higher percentage of people opting the same.
Road Ahead!
In the upcoming months, Onera plans to launch pilot programs across the country to work with leaders in sleep medicine, including pulmonologists, neurologists and psychiatrists, ENTs, paediatricians and the military.
Onera Hartmut Schneider, M.D., Ph.D., Onera’s Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer, and Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, explains:
Being a leader in sleep research, I’ve always strived to teach sleep specialists and primary care physicians alike, passing on the knowledge, skills and insights necessary to diagnose and treat sleep disorders. Onera’s innovations are like finding the missing piece to a puzzle; the medical field finally has the tools they need to offer comprehensive sleep care.
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