Ultrahuman: Monitoring Health at Home

A Bangalore-based healthcare tech startup has caught the attention of delegates at the CES 2024 with their sleek Wi-Fi router lookalike health monitoring system hardware designed to monitor health at home. The Ultrahuman Home was showcased at the annual tech event where the company announced that shipments would start in July at $349. 

The company launched a new wearable device called Ultrahuman Ring Air last June in India, which was an upgrade over the Ultrahuman Ring launched in 2022. An early bird price of  Rs.24,999 was announced for the new device, which was termed the lightest sleep tracking device in the world. 

The company recently faced a legal suit from Finnish health wearables maker Oura for alleged patents and copyrights infringements. The lawsuit was filed in a Texas district court last September. Oura had claimed that Ultrahuman had copied their technology instead of innovating and developing their own products. 

Ultrahuman was founded in 2019 by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal, who raised $17.5 million in August 2021 in Series B funding from a slew of investors including Steadview Capital, Alpha Wave Incubation, Nexus Venture Partners, and Blume Ventures. Their latest smart box to monitor health at home could be just the sort of impetus the company needs in the fast-growing and extremely competitive healthcare wearables market. 

What does the Ultrahuman Home do?

Coming to the product itself, Ultrahuman Home has sensors that allows users to monitor levels of natural and artificial light, air pollution, noise, humidity and smoke in the room where it is installed. The device shares data in the form of space scores and actionable insights to the Ultrahuman app home tab. 

The company’s existing offerings in the wearables segment targets the quantified self trend that links hardware to an app that crunches user data to deliver personalized lifestyle advice. For example, the Ultrahuman Air is capable of tracking your sleep, recovery, and movement to offer insights and tips via an app on your smartphone. 

(Source: Ultrahuman) 

The company’s next innovation via the static hardware supplement’s the smart ring to deliver personalized advice by also factoring in data from the indoor environment that a user is exposed to. However, it is also quite capable of functioning as a home tracker providing assessments of health in the home ecosystem. 

Company co-founder Mohit Kumar believes that the Ultrahuman Home box will be able to plug into a slew of IoT devices. So, what is basically an environment tracking box can be used to power other decisions such as auto-adjusting cooling or heating or even suggesting a better ambience for the bedroom to enhance sleep quality. 

The company plans to integrate with protocols such as the IFTTT to get into home automation whereby specific aspects of environment control, aided by air conditioners or humidifiers and even lighting can be adjusted automatically without impacting the user’s sleep in any way. While the impact of diet and activity is well known on health and wellness, this Bangalore startup hopes to include environment quality into this mix.  

Given the legal challenge that Ultrahuman faced from Oura, this out-of-the-box thought of creating a stable hardware could be just the fillip that the Bangalore-based company wanted to outrun competitors that also includes Whoop. Both these companies have remained in the wearables business thus far. 

Ultrahuman home does not require any subscription and the deal ends with the one-off purchase of the box. This automatically opens up the gifting doors as users can spend one-time and gift a product that does not require the receiver to spend money on subscription on what is essentially a static device.