Airo Health

Airo Health developed as a health technology company focused on passive monitoring through a wearable armband. The company was founded in 2013 in Waterloo, Canada, by a team that included Abhilash Jayakumar, Naman Kumar, and Emmanuel DeVries, later joined by Maryam Jahed. The founders' personal experiences with the consequences of high-stress lifestyles and a desire to help others avoid similar paths fueled the company's mission. Airo Health participated in the Summer 2016 batch of the Y Combinator accelerator program and secured $125K in seed funding from investors, including FundersClub and Creative Destruction Lab.

The core of Airo Health's business was the AIRO Wristband, a device designed to automatically and passively track key health metrics. The company targeted individuals seeking to proactively manage their well-being by providing a holistic view of their health without requiring manual input. The business model was centered on the direct-to-consumer sale of this hardware, with pre-orders initially priced at $149. The armband's key function was to monitor stress by measuring heart rate variability (HRV), providing users with alerts during moments of rising stress and offering personalized recommendations to mitigate it. Over time, the device was intended to learn an individual's unique physiological patterns to identify personal stress triggers.

The AIRO wristband's features extended beyond stress management. It was engineered to track sleep cycles, distinguishing between light, deep, and REM sleep to assess restorative quality. A unique selling proposition was its nutrition monitoring capability, which utilized a built-in spectrometer to detect metabolites in the bloodstream, allowing it to estimate caloric intake automatically. This combination of automated nutrition, stress, sleep, and exercise tracking in a single device aimed to offer a more comprehensive health analysis than was available from other activity trackers on the market at the time. However, in November 2013, the company canceled pre-orders and issued refunds, citing the need for more extensive testing and calibration before the product would be ready for the general market. According to Y Combinator's database, the company is now listed as inactive. Keywords: Airo Health, wearable technology, health monitoring, stress tracking, heart rate variability, HRV sensor, passive health monitoring, nutrition tracking, sleep tracking, Y Combinator, Naman Kumar, Abhilash Jayakumar, mental wellness, personal health device, biometric data, getairo.com, wearable sensor, automated health tracking, calorie monitoring, stress management wearable, personal health analytics, consumer health tech, Waterloo startup