The Angel Health monitor, besides having a fairly morbid name (you rarely see angels unless you’re sailing down the river Styx), is actually quite cool. Designed to be a “developer’s” health monitoring system, the Angel senses motion and acceleration, skin temperature, blood oxygen saturation, and heart rate.
Created by Eugene Jorov and Amir Shlomovich in Israel, the pair have focused on first building a sufficiently open platform and SDK. Rather than depend on a stock piece of software, the Angel is potentially infinitely malleable, becoming a heart attack sensor for one developer and a sports band for another.
Is this model a good one? I don’t see why not. I could see Angel as being a white label solution for developers and designers who want to create solutions for diagnostics and testing. While it won’t be as commercially popular as, say, the Fitbit, it still makes sense.
They plan on creating an SDK and running a crowdfunded project in the next few weeks. It will work with iOS and Android and also be accessible via a web API.
“We are already working with medical advisors to ensure the data developers can access will enable irregular heart rate detection, fall detection, early heart failure warning and beyond,” said Jorov. “The raw data Angel provides for each sensor enables independent health research by partners.”
Jorov started the company after losing a friend to a heart attack a few years ago. He also puts his health where is mouth is. Amir snowboards and Eugene is a “nutrition experimenter” and “yacht sailor.” Clearly both of them could use this band, especially if Amir falls off a mountain or Eugene “experiments” too much.