Annual physicals and getting a regular blood test are essential for everyone’s health, yet they only provide a snapshot of your health at that point in time. People are constantly evolving, and while there’s plenty of buzz around fitness tracking, the insights they provide are fairly limited.
Neuon Inc. aims to make thorough health testing more accessible with an at-home blood analysis tool known as Cor. The concept is fairly similar to at-home glucose testing; users simply press the cartridge against their skin to collect a blood sample. The cartridge is then dropped into a device, the sample is processed, run through several back-end algorithms, and within five minutes the test results are sent to the companion smartphone app.
In addition to the speed and ease of application, a huge value of the service is that with results, users receive not only updates and progress reports, but tailored recommendations to improve their health.
The primary indicators checked by the test include cholesterol (HDL, LDL, Total), fasting blood glucose, inflammation (fibrinogen), and triglycerides.
Although Cor sounds similar to the now embittered Theranos, the former is completely an at-home solution, so users don’t have to worry about their samples being handled in a lab and incurring long delays for results. The other key difference is that data from Cor is being marketed as general lifestyle insights (to see at a general level what helps, what’s working, and what’s not) rather than definitive medical guidance.
At the moment the Cor app will only be available for the iPhone however results also can be delivered via the web app and through email.
As far as the scientific concepts go, while Cor has gone through clinical validation studies, the results have yet to be published in peer-reviewed journals. Although it’s an ambitious project, the founder of Nueon, Bob Messerschmidt, is a former Apple engineer with over 30 years of experience in the health and medicine optics space. The team also has backing from an early investor in Google, and medical experts from Stanford University.
Cor has a listed retail price of $299 and can be pre-ordered via their Indiegogo campaign. After the first purchase there’s a $10 a month subscription fee which includes cartridges as needed. A single reader can be used by multiple people, however, each user requires a separate subscription.
The campaign has raised over $80,000 to date (over 150% of the original goal) from more than 400 backers, and they still have a month to go.
Although Nueon has venture capitalists as part of their team, the company says they aren’t self-funded because they want to ensure the product has a solid market in place.
