By Karen-Janine Cohen
Persuading computers to “hear” as do people was Kaustubh Kale’s goal in graduate school at the University of Florida in Gainesville. A few decades later, that research inspired the Hemotag Vitals, the flagship product of his company, Aventusoft. Hemotag is a bio-acoustic device that can reveal the heart’s structural health. It is geared especially for those suffering from heart failure and structural heart disease.
The company is now expanding its presence at the Research Park at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, moving from its home at Global Ventures, a post startup incubator, to a 7,500-square-foot suite in the park. Meanwhile, the company is in the process of raising more investment.
Kale, company CEO and founder [pictured above], explained that the heart, if under pressure from underlying disease or other abnormal conditions, will work harder, leading to enlargement and stiffness. If the condition is untreated, the organ will eventually fail. The Hemotag is designed to let doctors avoid invasive procedures when evaluating a patient.
“Basically, what happens is you are looking at a structural deformation of the heart and we can see exactly what is happening to the heart,” he said. Simply put, the Hemotag picks up vibrations from multiple locations and, using proprietary software, conveys information about the structure of the patient’s heart. “This keeps us ahead of the game,” he said.
Kale is originally from a coastal town south of Mumbai. He earned his undergraduate degree in computational neural engineering. He earned both a masters in electrical and computer engineering and business administration at UF. However, he did his research in the university’s computational and neural engineering lab. His work caught the attention of Motorola, which in the early 2000s, had a big cell phone plant in Sunrise. “They liked my innovation and hired me on their research and development team,” he said. Motorola used his innovation for walkie talkie technology, bar code scanners and cell phones.
Kale eventually went out on his own. Aventusoft, founded in 2014, was originally funded through a Department of Defense contract, aimed toward developing technology to help diagnose internal bleeding on the battlefield.
It was an experience in his own family that lead Kale to focus on the heart. His twin daughters were on heart monitors in their first weeks of life. Kale realized the innovations he had already developed might be adapted to “hearing” the heart. “That could become my mission,” he said. The company developed ways to apply his advances to cardiac signals.
Much of their funding – about $10 million over the last decade – comes from government agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health. The Food and Drug Administration registered the Hemotag late last year. The company’s business model is to rent the devices to hospitals on a monthly subscription basis. Currently it is in clinical trials with a number of actively monitored patients at South Florida hospitals.
The company expects to add another 25 jobs to its 15 person-strong current workforce.
Kale said his goal is to save a million lives, adapting the technology to address other issues, for example postpartum cardiomyopathy, and other maternal mortality issues. Meanwhile, Kale’s other commitment is to decreasing waste in the medical and health care field. For example, the Hemotag’s components are sourced from right off the shelf and the unit can be cleaned with soap and water.
“When it comes to product design, keeping sustainability in mind,” is key, he said. The challenge, he said, is to have an impact in health care and in conserving the earth’s resources when designing and producting products. “Lives are one thing, but you don’t want to damage the planet,” he said.
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