Techpreneurship: Apps I Want!

Jeff Amerine

Techpreneurship, with Jeff Amerine

(Jeff Amerine is an IA advisor, entrepreneurship educator, and officer with the University of Arkansas Technology Licensing Office. Each Thursday, his Techpreneurship blog will appear in INOV8. Drop him a line in comments.)

I tell my entrepreneurship students to be observant, look for the unmet need, figure out if meeting that need can be a business…

So, I decided just for kicks to identify some mobile applications I would personally pay for if they existed today. By the way, if these do exist today, go ahead and embarrass me publicly by responding to this blog with the details and the site links. Here goes…

I want a mobile iPhone/Blackberry/Droid  app and non-invasive wearable sensor that can measure blood glucose, HDL/LDL, triglyserides, blood pressure, electrolyte levels, and pulse rate.  I want the application to have the ability to send alerts when these things are critically out of whack to me and others I may designate like my doctor, local 911, athletic trainer, or my home security monitoring service.

I want the sensor to be outdoor sport durable, and 3G and zigbee enabled so I can communicate with the handheld application and/or back to a web portal application.  I want the portal and handheld app to log my stats, have built in reports/analysis, and to provide a dashboard of key indicators and alerts.  I want the mobile app to be free, and I want to pay no more than $9.99/month for the service.  I want the sensor to be less than $100.

OK. Clearly, I am “boiling the ocean” with the myriad of requirements above.  This sort of capability would have broad applicability in athletic training, home health care, and personal wellness.  The app part is easy.   The non-invasive sensor part, not so much…

If I could just get a real-time, wearable, wireless-enabled, non-invasive blood glucose monitor for my dad, that would be a start.  He has had Type II Diabetes since 1984.  My biggest worry these days is that his blood sugar occasionally drops to very low levels while he’s sleeping.  When he wakes up and his glucose level is 40 or below, he has a tough time getting to the refrigerator to get orange juice to bring it back up.  So with this type of monitor, the sensor could activate an audible alarm or cause a home monitoring service to ring the phone when these blood sugar levels begin to trend downward toward unsafe levels, especially late at night.  Better yet, if I could securely monitor a web portal or from my Blackberry as well that would allow me to keep “an eye” on my Dad, and to track his A1C levels, etc.

I know there are external, wearable, glucose pump solutions, etc., but for the elderly (talking about a sample size of one here – my dad), the pump solutions are hardly non-invasive.

So here are a couple of real-life unmet needs…Techpreneurs,  build me a solution!  I am ready to buy, and I bet others would be also.

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