2023 at Norbert Health — from products to business
Looking back at 2023…
The year 2023 will be remembered by many entrepreneurs and tech startups as the year that made them, or broke them. Very little money available on the venture capital market, raging inflation, high interest rates, tough geopolitical conditions — all that made life hard for many people of course, but also for many entrepreneurs and startups who struggled to raise money and stay alive.
On the other hand, chatbots and LLMs (aka AIs) broke ground and made it into our everyday lives, changing the game in many ways and offering new promises of more AI breakthroughs ahead, like self-supervised learning, where AI can learn without input from us. They are giving us real opportunities to advance our products in the short term. A very exciting year for a team like ours, who lives and breathes AI, and have been doing so for many years.
As far as we are concerned at Norbert, thanks to an incredible team and some amazing investors, notably our angel investors, we are still alive and kicking, and doing better than ever. Not only did we survive this tough year, but we achieved considerable goals, and made crucial decisions to get us ready for a pivotal year 2024.
What we did in 2023
- Tech
We reached impressive accuracies for heart rate and skin temperature — less than 2 RMSE for heart rate in real world environments across several studies, temperature steadily under 0.5 degrees RMSE. We moved the needle on respiratory rate — less than 3 RMSE in real world environments, ready for prime time! And … we got our SpO2 to incredible accuracy on our pre-clinical studies — less than 3 RMSE on SpO2s ranging from 70 to 99.
This WORKS! Oh, one more thing: we released the first prototype of our blood pressure measurement! - FDA
It was a long and hard effort but we did it — we finalized and submitted our first 510(k) for FDA clearance file. There is more coming for sure, with other vital signs and more features to be cleared, some class 1 registrations as well. But the first one is the hardest and we did it! - Team
First of all, we brought on our Chief Commercial Officer, Ahmad, whose deep healthcare expertise and company scale up successes have allowed us to refine our strategy and go-to-market quickly and with surgical precision. Then we hired our new CTO, Jacques, who is an incredible addition to an already tech-heavy team — Jacques is another pioneer of AI for healthcare, along with yours truly, and has spent his expansive career in medical devices. - Pilots
We started and ran 7 new pilots, in diverse settings ranging from office spaces, motor sports, to of course deep clinical settings. We collected sturdy real world evidence that our device functions in extreme conditions and made it ready for real world workflows.
- Manufacturing
We signed a manufacturing agreement with a top tier contract manufacturer and are very excited about this! Our assembly line was set up in a factory in Romania and will start making certified devices early 2024 — this is happening!
- Other things
We brought on a new board member — the amazing Saeju Jeong, founder of Noom. We did put a logo on our Ed devices. We created the best stickers ever. And we played fierce ping pong games together!
Here is what we changed in 2023
- We started running other AIs, like motion analysis, sleep monitoring, cognitive assessments and LLMs on our device. And it works. These new AIs make the Norbert device more versatile and turn it into a single, all-in-one hub for health monitoring, assessments, and therapeutics. More coming soon on that!
- We realized that the other AIs mentioned above can help nursing or healthcare staff or patients keep track of their health and wellness with simpler FDA categories or being totally exempt. Which gets us to bringing more devices, faster and earlier, to your homes or clinics.
- We focused on angel investors and operators to finance our company during the VC drought of 2023, and will continue to do so as this has been very positively impactful for us. Angels are the new VCs. Hats off to some of our VCs who did step up in spite of the the harsh market.
What we are doing in 2024
We are preparing a post specifically on that. But here are some spoilers: we are making Norbert a real, comprehensive healthcare hub, that is able to run all the AI you need to run, on a single, all-in-one, convenient and smart device. Norbert can look after elders or chronic disease patients in their homes — vitals sensing AI, cognitive assessment AI, mobility and fall prevention AI, medication reminder AI, and a general AI that will optimize all these outcomes. Ubiquitous healthcare sensing is a cornerstone for the next generation of health care. Norbert is enabling this transition.
