Why we invested in Healthy.io

As smartphones with better cameras and increased capabilities become more widely adopted, we are looking for startups that will offer DIY diagnostics in the years to come. We see real promise in the increasing usage of smartphones in hospitals, at the point of care, and by consumers at home to monitor chronic diseases, diagnose new health issues, and communicate with medical staff.

Healthy.io is an early leader in this new era, in which consumers will be empowered to take better care of themselves while facilitating advanced medicine to reach more populations around the world.

Healthy.io has managed to match the accuracy of a medical-grade scanner using a smartphone and machine vision to perform urinalysis and albumin-to-creatinine ratio (ACR) tests. With a slick app and user experience, Healthy.io allows any smartphone user to perform a urine test from the comfort of their own home.

Using a standard urine dipstick, Healthy.io can detect a wide range of conditions, including urinary tract infections, ketosis, pregnancy health, and can indicate kidney and liver diseases all with a single test.

In addition, Healthy.io could help those who are at risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and require an annual urine test. While early treatment is highly effective in reducing the progression of kidney disease, less than 20 percent of those at risk regularly get tested. By enabling at-risk populations to take the test at home instead of in a lab, Healthy.io helps people at risk of CKD to increase adherence to regular testing, which could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in medical costs each year.

This is the kind of potential impact that Samsung NEXT hopes to invest in, but this is especially true in the health sector, where we are looking to find solutions that will make the highest standard of health more accessible to the masses through smartphone devices, regardless of their geographical location.