Healthcare technology firm to open integrated technology lab

Healthcare technology firm Casana has launched a Smart Integrated Technologies Lab (SIT Lab) from which the Rochester company will conduct research studies to evaluate its noninvasive health monitoring products, including the Heart Seat.

The SIT Lab will be located in the firm’s Rochester headquarters and will be home to studies funded by Casana and led by Casana’s Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Nicholas Conn and Co-founder and head of R&D, Dave Borkholder.

The vision for the research lab is to develop and validate innovative and easy-to-use products that allow for effortless in-home health monitoring, officials said. These efforts strive to enable proactive and preventative health care in the home.

Casana’s first observational study launching at the SIT Lab will evaluate the performance of the company’s first product, the Heart Seat, which is in the early stages of commercialization and has the goal of collecting clinical-grade measures for blood pressure, blood oxygenation, heart rate and cardiac output.

The SIT Lab also will test and refine the user’s experience with Casana’s products in a controlled environment, measuring subjects’ general perception of the products and their experience physically interacting with them. Casana plans to recruit hundreds of subjects from the greater Rochester area to support its studies at the SIT Lab.

“We are thrilled to launch the SIT Lab here in Rochester and open our doors to members of the Rochester community, who can help us advance effortless and noninvasive in-home health monitoring,” Conn said. “Casana’s health monitoring technologies have the potential to transform the healthcare system by facilitating the transition from reactive care to proactive and preventive care, while simultaneously improving patient outcomes and reducing costs.”

Casana’s goal is to use the SIT Lab to investigate technologies that fix remote health monitoring by reducing compliance barriers to home health monitoring and making it as effortless as possible to gather consistent, long-term vital trends for heart failure patients.

By combining data from sensors such as the electrocardiogram (ECG), ballistocardiogram (BCG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) integrated into daily household objects like a toilet seat, Casana’s advanced algorithms have the potential to give care providers a reliable and holistic picture of their patient’s or loved ones’ health.

Casana was founded in 2018 by Conn, whose vision it was to use passive, connected sensors to solve the challenges for managing health at home. He developed the Heart Seat during his PhD work at Rochester Institute of Technology.

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