Hands On With Wello, The iPhone Case That Monitors And Tracks Your Vital Signs


If you’re like most people, you only check in with your vital signs (temperature, blood pressure, pulmonary function, heartrate, ECG, blood oxygen levels, and the like) when you go to the doctor. But what if you could obtain that data more often through a single device that’s almost always in your pocket or purse? You might be much more in tune with your body and how it responds to different things in your life.

That’s the idea behind the Wello, a smartphone case that doubles as a personal health monitoring system. Azoi, the company that makes the Wello, says that they’ve packed the capabilities of more than $2,000 worth of medical equipment in one $199 device. It’s an interesting claim, so we asked Azoi’s founder and CEO Hamish Patel to come by TechCrunch HQ and give us a hands-on demo, which you can see in the video above.

The Wello is available to pre-order in the U.S. through Friday at 11:59pm Pacific Time. Patel says that the Wello will begin shipping in the States in the fall of 2014, pending FDA approval.

For most of the early adopters who buy the Wello in the U.S., it will mostly be a fun”quantified self” accessory, complementing the FitBit and other such apps. But Patel says that the larger vision of the Wello is a bit deeper. Azoi as a company aims to help improve the lives of people all over the world who may not have easy access to basic healthcare, Patel says. That’s why from the start, the Wello launched to be available in 34 countries.

“In a place like India or Africa… most of the clinics don’t have spirometers. So people have to travel hundreds of kilometers to a clinic to get their oxygen levels done,” Patel said. “Imagine a device like Wello, with an Android phone or an iPhone. This could actually service a whole village. We wanted a larger set of people to get access to Wello because of the disruptive nature it has in healthcare.”