Every major health wearable on the market today is chasing the same goal: getting closer to lab-quality data without a lab. Sathya Elumalai, CEO & Co-founder of Aidar Health, thinks the industry has been looking in the wrong place.
"Two of the richest windows into a human body isn't in the wrist or a finger or a ring, but it's actually the mouth, because we have access to breath and saliva, which is kind of considered the mirror of the body," Sathya said in a recent conversation with Logan Plaster for StartUp Health's Health Moonshot Update series.
That insight is the foundation of MouthLab, a handheld device that works like a breathalyzer – a user breathes into it, and the device collects around 10 vital health parameters in under a minute. From there, Aidar Health's platform builds a health index designed to flag a potential health decline days, sometimes weeks, before it becomes a hospitalization.
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Going deeper than the wrist
Sathya doesn't dismiss wearables like Oura or Whoop. But he sees a ceiling in what a wrist-worn sensor can capture, especially given how skin pigmentation and surface placement limit signal quality. Breath, saliva, and the blood vessels in the lips, he explained, offer a more direct read on the body's real chemistry – lung function, kidney markers, metabolism – without requiring a blood draw or a trip to a lab.
Meeting the highest-need patients first
Rather than going direct to consumer, Aidar Health chose to start where the need is greatest: skilled nursing and long-term care facilities. Sathya described the shift required after two years in the field, moving from a device-first pitch to a broader platform that helps facilities improve staffing efficiency and star ratings. MouthLab has cut vital-sign collection time from about 12 minutes per resident to under one minute, freeing up staff time for direct patient care.
Clinically, the company is focused on catching chronic kidney disease and COPD earlier than current standards of care allow. That mission is personal for Sathya: both of his parents were diagnosed with CKD at stage three, well past the point where earlier intervention could have helped, and both ultimately needed dialysis.
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A shift in how the work gets paid for
Reimbursement policy is also moving in Aidar Health's direction. Sathya pointed to CMS's proposed changes to remote patient monitoring codes, aimed at cutting down on outcome-agnostic billing, and highlighted Aidar Health's selection into CMS's new ACCESS program, which reimburses based on outcomes generated rather than time spent or measurements taken. For Aidar Health, it opens a path to billing Medicare directly.
Looking ahead, Sathya is focused on scale: more facilities, more data, and ultimately, a path into patients' homes.
Sathya Elumalai has been a StartUp Health community member since 2016. If you're working on something in health innovation and want to connect with Sathya or share where your own journey stands, join the StartUp Health community to get inside access to the conversations, connections, and events shaping health innovation.
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