less ignorable messages, including phone calls and social feedback from relatives or doctors, Rose explains. That philosophy makes sense, given Rose’s background as the founder and former CEO of Ambient Devices, a Cambridge company that pioneered the idea of using household objects to convey digital information. The popular Ambient Orb, for example, can be programmed to glow green when the stock market is up and red when it’s down (sending owners scurrying to their Etrade accounts). “One thing we learned at Ambient is that if there is a data display that’s presenting data you care about and can do something about, these pervasive displays can become persuasive displays,” Rose says.
At Vitality, he’s applying this idea to a huge and urgent problem. Medication “non-adherence,” as the healthcare industry labels the phenomenon, leads to 125,000 deaths each year in the United States, researchers believe, not to mention avoidable illnesses that cost medical payers an estimated $200 billion to $300 billion a year. Today’s state-of-the-art adherence programs usually consist either of snail-mail letters, often sent out weeks after someone has stopped taking a medicine, or expensive live phone calls, so there’s a very big incentive for health plans and employers to find faster, cheaper ways to increase adherence.
And if people actually took their medicines as directed and refilled their prescriptions on schedule, pharmaceutical companies would obviously sell a lot more pills. “At the same time as we’re selling on Amazon, we’re sending the devices to brand managers at pharmaceutical companies and CEOs of insurance companies, and even to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, trying to spread the idea,” says Rose. “That’s more important to us than making a lot of money from selling the initial units.”
In fact, those initial units won’t be on the market for long; Rose says a much-improved version of the GlowCaps system is coming this winter. It is a two-piece system with an AT&T cellular modem built directly into the nightlight. That way, data from the GlowCap can be relayed to Vitality’s servers without the need for a wireless router or a local Internet connection.
Vitality has “less than 10” full-time employees, according to Rose, and is funded so far by a group of angel investors who include MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and Patrick Soon-Shiong, the executive chairman of Abraxis BioScience, a Los Angeles-based biotech firm. (Rose calls Soon-Shiong a “super angel, a Big Angel.”) Rather than raise venture capital, Rose hopes to bootstrap the company through direct distribution deals with pharmaceutical companies and self-insured employers—“Companies like EMC that are big enough to feel the effects of negative health outcomes” from non-adherence, Rose explains. “Historically, those are the companies who are more innovative in terms of supporting employee health programs around things like exercise and dieting.”
Rose says Boston is probably “the world’s best place” to be building a startup dedicated to melding digital devices, wireless communications, computing, and healthcare. “The research hospitals are here, and there are people really thinking carefully about connecting the dots between behavorial change and healthcare costs,” he says.
Vitality is working with Partners Healthcare’s Center for Connected Health, as well as Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, to run several 1,000-member randomized trials to document whether the GlowCaps system can actually do what Rose thinks it can do—help patients live healthier lives with chronic conditions like high blood pressure. “At the Center for Connected Health, they really believe in the vision of low-cost, pervasive sensors and displays in the home, and in the inevitable dispersion of healthcare into the home,” Rose says. But whether a connected home is really a healthier home is something the researchers, and Vitality’s customers, will have to determine over time.
