the platform” as it grows and learns to manage—and make sense of—all that mobile sensor data. Ultimately, he sees the company “pushing the envelope on what information collected from mobile devices can do. The future is wide open to many more applications.” Moss hints that this sort of technology “could be used by companies, not just for [understanding] patients, but for customers and audiences.”
If this all sounds more like a science project than a real business, well, there is some of that. The company is figuring out what kinds of patterns are useful and what kinds aren’t; which subset of disorders are actually addressable (ones that a phone could be sensitive to); and what its analysis can really discern about patients’ health, which is a fantastically subtle and difficult nut to crack. As is standard for a company working on analytics and pattern recognition, though, its software will improve with more data and more users. And if it gets good enough, look out.
Ginger fits into a broader theme of Boston-area tech startups that have emerged from the Media Lab in recent years. Several are about understanding human social behavior by analyzing various kinds of sensor data. Affectiva is about understanding consumers’ emotions through video and other methods. Bluefin Labs is about understanding TV audiences via social media and text analysis. And Sociometric Solutions (another Pentland spinoff) is about understanding how people communicate and behave at work.
But back to the task at hand. Ginger certainly faces challenges as a small company selling its technology and services to the healthcare market, a notoriously slow-moving industry. “If you want to sell to a top-tier provider, you need scientific validation, some sort of clinical trial or randomized trial. That kind of stamp is critical,” Madan says. “You have to show here’s a significantly better outcome.”
To that end, Ginger is already working with a couple of healthcare providers and a couple of “top five” pharma companies. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital has deployed Ginger’s mobile technology in a study of patients with inflammatory bowel disease, for example.
Indeed, the startup sees a big near-term opportunity here. “Pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, especially [pharma companies], are looking for a new position,” says Karan Singh, another Ginger co-founder (and MIT Sloan MBA). They want to be “responsible for patient outcomes,” he says, so they have a “need for a proactive solution.”
It’s very early days, but Ginger will be looking to add to its six-person staff later this year, the founders say. And in the coming year, the company’s goals include “broader deployment” and “defining product-market fit,” says Madan.
Moss, the company’s advisor, offered a closing thought on where Ginger ultimately could end up—and how it could advance the theme of understanding human behavior, if all goes well. “There will be several big companies, maybe a handful built in the next five years, that will make that process of understanding the science of this data easy and digestible,” he says.
We’ll be watching to see if Ginger is one of them.
