An interview with the founder and CEO, Rupam Das

1. Can you tell us more about Acculi Labs and the work that you do?

We help patients with multiple chronic diseases manage their illness effectively at point-of-care and recover in the most viable and human way.

Acculi Labs is a Patient-Centric, Outcome-Driven, Point-Of-Care Multiple-Chronic-Disease(MCC) Management company to help: Patients with multiple chronic diseases. to achieve/overcome: Outcome and Cost-Reduction of care for the patients and load minimization in healthcare with: Clinical-Grade Mobile-based diagnostics/prognosis Application and home therapeutics.

I founded the company in the year 2017, after almost a decade of research in Computer Aided Diagnostics (CAD), most of the work of which is in the public domain. The overall idea of the company has been to make diagnostics available to the masses. We have also brought Psychophysiological Diagnostics. The modern approach of pathological diagnostics highlights the structural(permanent) changes in the body (organs or blood biochemistry), whereas psychophysiological diagnostics highlights the response of the body and mind against a certain illness. Therefore, we help the clinicians to better detect the root cause, track the progress of the disease, predict the event risks, and help the patients remotely.

My role in the company is to drive the innovation in diagnostics and home-remedy based therapeutics.

2) What was the need you were answering and what solutions have already been introduced on a big scale to the market?

1. Need that we were answering:

Today chronic diseases are the highest-burden on healthcare. Hospitals and clinics are handling almost 80% of chronic disease patients. Chronic diseases are long term illness and do not get cured by medicines. They need more support and care in the home setup. Almost 4 billion of the world’s population is suffering from one or the other chronic illnesses. Chronic diseases also cost an average of $550 to the patients annually. They require constant monitoring and diagnosis from the home setup. Most advanced diagnostic tests are costly and are not available at the point of care. Therefore, the load in the healthcare and patient care support that we have is insufficient. Also, most of the chronic diseases are the outcome of aging, stress, and improper lifestyle. Therefore, the only way to manage them well is through the intervention in the above three areas.

Acculi Labs is addressing this need by its two verticals: Point of care diagnostics and monitoring with its clinical-grade mobile application called Lyfas and Point of care-based therapeutics that introduces BENDSH (Breathing, Exercise, Nutrition, Diet, Sleep and Stress intervention, Home-Remedy).

Both of our verticals are magnitudes of time more affordable than the existing peers, needs no sophisticated infrastructure or skilled manpower, is highly scalable, and is constantly validated and improved with our machine empowered human intelligence.

2. What solutions have been introduced at a big scale in the Market.

• Apple Watch, Samsung Health, HRVTraining, FitBit, CureFit are in preventive health where they help the individuals to avoid the diseases. However, as stress, aging and lifestyle are three important contributors to chronic diseases, and it is highly difficult to prevent stress or aging, various chronic diseases still get manifested.
• Wellness clinics like StarHealth and AppoloHealth helps patients with chronic diseases to manage the disease better through lifestyle intervention. However, they offer a costly annual package that ranges from $300-$1000. They come with three or four times annual health checks and don’t offer prognosis or event risk prediction.
• AliveCor, Sanket ECG offers point-of-care ECG based monitoring. They serve acute patients at a high risk of event and acute patients post-surgery. However, they need external devices and the quality of ECG trace depends upon the quality of lead configuration. Furthermore, they provide only a cardiac profile.

Currently, clinical practitioners rely on Pathology tests such as Blood Tests and Imaging tests to diagnose a disease. However, such tests are not viable for the prognosis purpose as well as for analyzing the root cause of the diseases. Psychology and Physiology Measurement are needed regularly for monitoring the changes in the body and to evaluate the effect of stress and lifestyle for chronic patients.

• Devices like NadiTarangini, D-RAP, Polar H10 belt, offers Physiology tests, but are expensive and can only be used in the clinical setup.
• Diagnostics.ai, HealthVector crunches data from different path tests and provides a better diagnostics. However, they rely on the 3-4 times annual health tests that a patient provides to them. The AI data depends upon external sources and are not IOT based real-time.

  Lyfas Advantage:

  Lyfas provides complete lifestyle analysis just with a clinical-grade mobile digital biomarker tool. When you keep your finger in the rare camera of an android phone for 3 minutes, the application captures over 108 biomarkers and then profile them into:
  a) Lifestyle Parameters(Stress, Sleep, Energy, Pain, Metabolism)
  b) Psychological Parameters(Physiological stress, Psychological Stress, Pathological Stress)
  c) Organ System Health(Cardiovascular, Bones and Muscles, Endocrine, Immunity, Metabolic System, Respiratory System)
  d) Early root cause of diseases(Insulin Resistance, Hypertension, Atherosclerosis, PCOS, VB12, VitaminD deficiency)

  Lyfas is also tested vigorously clinically. The cardiovascular accuracy is 95%, COVID accuracy is 92%.

  Therefore:
  1) It is a much more scalable and affordable solution over the competitors in Preventive Health. Besides being affordable, Lyfas is much more clinically tested and reliable.

  2) Acculi Labs also offers HomeRemedy and simple Lifestyle changes for Chronic diseases. These are clinically tested and the prognosis and disease tracking and health improvement are viably tracked through Lyfas. Acculi’s therapeutics is home-based and don’t burden the patient’s pocket. Therefore we have cost and home-comfort advantages over our wellness counterparts.

  3), Unlike other point-of-care monitoring devices that are organ-specific, Lyfas provides multiple organ profiles for multiple diseases and thus we cover a wider patient base than our home monitoring competitors.

  4) Lyfas provides currently missing diagnostic components of Physiopathology and Psychophysiology into clinical decision making. Thus we compliment the players in this domain and don’t compete.

  5) Lyfas Analytics, ML and AI crunches data from our own system. Patients take nearly daily tests. IOT enabled big Data is the key to Lyfas AI learning. Unlike our competitors, we get both Pathology, and Physiology data which in future will provide much better recommendation systems.

3) Who are the users of your products?

As I mentioned, patients with Multiple chronic diseases are our main users. Our next set of users are doctors with affinity towards functional medicine and who are treating chronic disease patients.

4) How do you see Acculi Labs in the next five years?

We see ourselves as a pioneer in Digital Health for driving the diagnostics and care through our technology innovation and our human centric care delivery system. We see ourselves as the most trusted company in point-of-care disease management. Also we have plans to serve about 1B human population over the next five years, with our tech enabled care delivery platform.

5) What advice can you give to aspiring startups and entrepreneurs?

I am a great believer of 3Cs

1. Cause: Money can never be a cause for what you are doing. Entrepreneurship is hard. It may break one to an unimaginable extend. Personal life, peace, sleep all can be gone. Therefore, the reason or the cause for which you are an entrepreneur must be very strong. It should be so strong that even if you are hungry for a month, you keep working.

2. Consistency: If you keep doing something consistently over a period of time, you will certainly win. It is easy to work for 20 hours a day for a year. But it is hard to work for ten hours daily for 5 years stretch. Doing something consistently makes you a winner because most competitors lose their steam by then.

3. Challenge: Entrepreneurship throws unprecedented challenges. There might be many occasions where the world will appear upside down. Markets may collapse, a political crisis may arise, a pandemic may hit the world, business may be gone in no time, technology may replace the business, another competitor may outcompete you. So an entrepreneur’s journey is always filled with ups and downs. It, therefore all comes down to mind. The mind must be trained well to expect and deal with such adversity. Put yourself in a difficult situation. Explore unknown territories. Synthesize and simulate the difficult situations where you have nothing. Think from zero. Challenge yourself, your skills, ability, knowledge, business. Practice failure and rising from ashes. The more you put yourself in such difficult situations and come out of them, the more stable your mind remains in crisis. At the end, what matters is how you handle crisis.

Finally, get good with humans. Life and business is about humans. Your success or failure will depend on how good you read humans, gel with them and create relationships that people take pride of.