Finally—a smartphone app designed to lower your blood pressure rather than raise it.
Digital health tool developer Hello Heart reeled in a $12 million series B round led by Khosla Ventures to help bankroll the expansion of its sales and engineering teams.
The California-based company offers its program to people with hypertension and prehypertension through their employers, with each participant receiving a Bluetooth-connected blood pressure monitor that sends readings to a mobile phone app. But that’s not all—because diabetes often turns up alongside hypertension, the app can track blood sugar, too.
Users may also log the medicines they take and follow their physical activity through health apps or a fitness tracker that syncs with the Hello Heart app. The app automatically receives data from LifeScan’s OneTouch blood glucose meter, but users may also put their numbers in manually if they prefer a different device, Hello Heart CEO Maayan Cohen told FierceMedTech.
The app digests all these data, explains what the various readings mean and provides cues to help users bring their blood pressure down to a normal range. The program uses machine learning to tailor its coaching to each individual.
“This is something people can do in their day-to-day, but it’s not something your doctor can tell you because they don’t have the time to break down high level recommendations into day-to-day adjustments,” Cohen said. “For example, parking further away from work to get a few more steps in.”
In a retrospective study of 5,000 Hello Heart users, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles and Harvard Medical School found that the program helped 57% reduce their blood pressure after four weeks and 69% after 22 weeks. The findings, which appear in the journal Health Information Science and Systems, are “2X-3X higher than the best results ever documented in a clinical study, including studies published by Hello Heart’s digital competitors,” the company said in a statement.
“Every consumer should be the CEO of their own health. Hello Heart is one of the only digital health solutions in hypertension that we have seen that has the potential to move the needle on population health and in delivering long term clinical impact. We are very excited to be a part of their journey,” said Vinod Khosla, managing partner of Khosla Ventures, in the statement.
In addition to Khosla, Hello Heart also collected funding from BlueRun Ventures, Maven Ventures and Resolute Ventures.