We often hear that the best way to attract success for your startup is by personal involvement. This is how the personal involvement of Sriram Venkata Subramanyan and Sajid Hussain kickstarted their venture CloseConnexions by lending them valuable advice. 

Subramanyan’s father once fell down after descending the bus. His fall resulted in a head injury and heavy bleeding. Worsening the matters, his father was alone and had to get home unaided. Hussain’s father on the other hand suffered from hypertension and due to limited mobility was undergoing difficulty. 

These life stressors in the duo’s life made them realise the importance of assistance for senior citizens. It is not necessary that tracking one’s health alone solved the problem. They decided to address the issue and left their jobs at Wipro to start CloseConnexions in 2015.

In many cases of chronic diseases, emphasis was put on tracking one’s vitals. The duo wanted to add safety to digital health. They created IoT wearable devices that help provide analytics and security. Oftentimes the elderly patients require assistance in certain diseases like dementia, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis and more.

Their 2 products are Demcare and SafeSteps. The former is a smartwatch made for dementia patients that send vital and location details to the family and doctors. The latter product is a walking stick for visually impaired elders that helps them navigate their surroundings while sending the user’s details to the caregivers. 

The Machina Research data says that the IoT market in 2020 was around $373 billion in revenues globally. Here, $149 billion came from the hardware and the rest, $179 billion got added due to software. In this, India accounts for only $10-12 billion.

This is one sector of health tech that is recently seeing the entry of big players like Google, Facebook, IBM, Infosys and Intel. The big names are looking for unique players that can solve deep-rooted market problems. Will IoT-based CloseConnexions benefit from the heavy investments by the big corporate guns?