Jeevan Lite

According to Central Bureau of Health Intelligence 2018 & 2017 data in India on average, there are around 41.5 million respiratory infection and Pneumonia cases reported in India, while the southern states like Telangana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala reported 14.2 million cases. WHO 2018 statistics show that 154 persons per 100,000 die each year from respiratory diseases in India. Respiratory diseases are the 2nd largest cause of death and are a leading cause of hospitalization in India

Respiratory-related illness is majorly seen in low-income populations. As the majority of them are from small-towns/tier 2 cities, hence they spend their whole life with the disease. Even if they get medical facilities and survive, they spend the rest of their life paying back the loan which is emotionally painful.

If anyone in a rural area needs ICU support they have to travel about 30~40 km to reach a tertiary care hospital. Devices like ventilators are sophisticated and require qualified training before one can use them on patients. Appointing a pulmonologist for every PHC is impossible in a country like India where doctor to patient ratio is 1:1456. Moreover, in PHC we do have frequent power failures hence using electric medical devices will be a challenge. Due to a lack of healthcare resources in rural areas, the rural population is forced to seek medical treatment in tier 1 cities. As the patient is admitted to the city hospital, the whole family has to travel and stay there which majorly affects the economic condition of the villagers and increases the burden of debt on their shoulders.

To solve this problem Aerobiosys has developed “Jeevan Lite” -a portable, cost-effective, IoT-enabled, battery-operated (4.5hrs backup) ICU care ventilation system to save the lives of rural patients. Our unique IoT-enabled monitoring will make ventilators accessible in rural/semi-urban parts of the country. The Jeevan Connect a cloud-based data collection platform provides a real-time display of the breath pattern, graphs, and other critical lung parameters. Each breath of the patient is recorded and shared with the doctors via a connected App to enable telemedicine support. Jeevan Lite can perform both invasive and non-invasive ventilation across a comprehensive set of modes and settings.

Jeevan Connect our cloud platform Is a comprehensive system built to solve the problems of major stakeholders in any Rural ICU care setup. We provide real-time monitoring of patients to clinicians, so now doctors sitting in tertiary care hospital of tier 1 cities are able to check the condition of a patient in rural or desert areas of the countries 

For hospital administration, we provide an organized servicing option, if any Jeevan Lite ventilator requires servicing within 48 hrs we will have servicing partner on the field to fix the issue. 

The USP of our device is its assistive smart ventilation feature that can diagnose the degree of lung damage and automate the operation of the ventilator by analyzing the patient data such as SpO2, heart rate, ECG data, XRAY/CT scan, and partial CO2 level in the lung using a novel AI algorithm. Our AI tool will analyze a patient's health and advise caregivers on the best therapeutic aims. This permits them to focus on calibrating other instruments required to keep a patient alive in an intensive care unit rather than adjusting parameters that are used as general settings for most patients on ventilators.

Both the founders of Aerobiosys are former Biodesign Healthcare Innovation fellows of the Centre for Healthcare Entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. They have spent around 300+ hrs in ICU care facilities and around 6-8 months in rural hospitals/clinics to understand the problems faced by the rural populations. Even today Aerobiosys Team works along with clinicians in tier 2/3 cities to get feedback on the user needs to enhance our device usage. 

We have a diverse team with skills and expertise that spans Execution and planning to Product design and software development.  Our team has doctors with 10+ years of experience and engineers with great skills to build next-gen products that are cutting edge and have huge potential for a disruptive market.

Aerobiosys has the vision of "MillionICU" to provide close to Million people an accessible and affordable ICU care facilities in rural and semi-urban parts of India. By partnering with MIT Solve, we will get expert mentorship on the project scaleup, funding opportunities, and marketing in the SOLVE community about our device and probable collaborator of different geographic. 

The teleICU support in the Jeevan Lite ventilator is called “Jeevan Connect”: A comprehensive system to track, monitor, and diagnose ICUcare patients over their treatment regime in a hospital or home care by building a strong network of relationships among the involved stakeholder's clinicians, nurses, patient caretakers. The system incorporates all the stakeholders through a centrally managed and controlled Jeevan connect platform database of patient medical records. 

Currently, doctors have to be next to the patients to know their patient's vital parameters, SpO2, ECG data, device emergency alerts, patient reports. But in the case of Jeevan Connect, real-time patient data is sent to clinicians and nurses on-demand basis or at regular intervals to make sure they provide better care for the patients. 

Our AI-based assistive tool will analyze a patient's health and suggest to caregivers the best therapeutic aims. This permits clinicians to focus on calibrating other instruments required to keep a patient alive in an intensive care unit rather than adjusting the parameters of a ventilator, moreover, this work reduced the load on the doctors by 45-55%. 

Potential impact goal for next year:

1. Percentage reduction in nosocomial infections among healthcare staff.

2. Reduction in cost incurred for providing ICU services to the service provider. 

3. Reduction in cost of services for availing the Aerobiosys system for the patient.

Our target is to majorly penetrate the rural and semi-urban market with our competitive price and service segment. As per the ICU planning and design guidelines, it is recommended to have one ventilator for every ICU bed. So approximately there is a requirement of close to 1 lakh units of a ventilator in India and the Total Addressable Market (TAM) is around 450 Million INR. Our target is to penetrate the imported ventilator market and slowly capture the indigenous device manufacturing market with our international device quality and competitive low cost of our device. Apart from the unit sale of devices, there is a requirement for one-time-use consumables such as breathing tubes, 0.2-micron filters, and some disposable units (100 Million INR).

Currently, we have captured 1% of the market and we plan to capture close to 10 % of the market by end of 2027 for which we are raising funds and looking for investment to expand our team and production capacity.

Monitoring, Evaluation, And Learning (MEL) Plan

 The MEL plan shall include but not be limited to the following indicators:

1. The number of facilities in which Aerobiosys ventilator systems were deployed.

2. The number of patients served through Aerobiosys ventilator systems in intervention facilities

3. The number of Respiratory patients requiring ventilation who were on Aerobiosys systems.

4. The number of breakdowns or service calls registered by hospitals for Aerobiosys.

Resources: In rural areas, there is no 24/7 electricity and experienced clinicians are absent.

Need Statement: There is a need for a portable, affordable and smart device with minimum clinician interaction which can understand the clinical condition of the patients and provide better care.

Implementation: Our unique IoT-based remote monitoring of patients usingJeevan lite ventilator will help small-town hospitals to use the ventilation facility and provide good quality healthcare even in rural or tier2/3 cities. The low cost and portability of the device make it affordable and accessible for everyone.

Outcome: One can get quality healthcare irrespective of which geographical location they belong to by using the Jeevan Connect platform. Due to the low cost, there won’t be any economic burden on the patient post-hospitalization.

Cost and patient care are important factors. Jeevan Lite has a low cost and is positioned high for patient care because of its unique IoT monitoring system which is absent in the competitor's sophisticated device. This feature helps the medical staff to provide appropriate care and medication without any delay in health conditions.

When compared against major ventilator brands in the Indian market, it is clear that our product has more features, in particular, IoT Data logging helps in remote patient monitoring, 10.1" Android display, and control system for a ventilator,  and accurate parameter suggestions. So far none of the existing multinational brands in the market has our novel automated smart ventilation feature that is present in our ventilator system.

The founders of Aerobiosys have developed the Duo-vent, an intelligent ventilation system that can provide lung isolation and independent controlled ventilation of both the lungs for patients with irregular consolidation. 

 J. Cyril Antony,(CTO) is an Electronics and Communication Engineer (BITS Pilani). Has experience in developing sensor-based oxygen cylinders, Dialysis reprocessing units, and other medical devices at IIT Madras Research Park. He leads the product development team.

Rajesh Thangavel (CEO), an alumnus of IIT Bombay with a Master's in Biotechnology, has experience in Computational Genomics and Viral Pathology, worked as Educator. Currently, he takes care of the Business Development and Operation of the company.

Prof. Renu John, Chair of Interdisciplinary Dept, Professor of Biomedical Engineering department IIT Hyderabad and Co-head of Center for Healthcare Entrepreneurship is the Technical Advisor of the Team. He constantly guides and supports the team personally and at a time helps in bringing the technical experts from the medical device industry. 

 Dr. Ashima Sharma is a renowned pulmonologist who heads the critical care department at Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences, Hyderabad. Her inputs have been used for clinical validation and design inputs.

Our target customers are 

1. Both Government and private Tertiary care hospitals with the bed-size of 30-300, 

2. Private Clinics with a minimum bed size of 10 and above 

3. Rural hospitals 

4. Ambulances

5. Old-age homes

6. Geriatric home care service provides

Business Model:

Jeevan Lite will be available on subscription and through direct sales, depending on customer requirements. Through direct sales, we plan to sell Jeevan Lite at a price of 400,000 INR achieving 23-25% of the Profit margin.

We will provide 3yrs of free services and maintenance. A compulsory subscription of Rs. 70,000/ year will commence in Year 4. Hospitals in Tier 2 cities, semi-urban and rural areas can't afford to buy medical devices, but getting the device on rent can be the right choice for them. Our unique subscription model of ventilator sales will help small-town hospitals to use the ventilation facility and provide good quality healthcare even in tier2/3 cities. The low cost and portability of the device make it affordable and accessible for everyone

Based on respiratory patient vs ICU bed statistics the number of ventilators is around 35-40 thousand and there is a gap of around 82,608 units before the COVID-19 pandemic. The ventilators deployed in the COVID crisis are all low-cost emergency use case ventilators (non-invasive mode of ventilation) with a shelf life of less than 1-2 yrs. Hence one cannot consider them as a complete replacement for an ICU ventilator. The demand for a full-fledged ICU ventilator will still exist post-covid-19 infection. So approximately the Total Addressable Market (TAM) is around 2065.20 Cr. 

Our target is to penetrate the imported ventilator market and slowly capture the indigenous device manufacturing market with our international device quality and competitive cost of our device. 

We aim to have a sale of 200 units by end of Q4 2021 and 800 units by end of 2022.  By the end of 2022, we will get CE approval for international sales of our device in Europe and other Asian Countries

Aerobiosys has received the below funding:

1. The Centre for Augmenting WAR with COVID-19 Health Crisis (CAWACH) Debit cum grant-based funding of Rs. 6.53 Million INR from the Department of Science and Technology, Govt of India for the Jeevan Lite Project. (https://www.indiascienceandtechnology.gov.in/listingpage/cawach-covid-10-0)
2. COVID19 Grant of 2 Million INR from the Department of Biotechnology for performing clinical study on patients
3. USAID India under Samridh Program provided CSR funding for deploying 50 units of a ventilators in semi-urban and tier 2 and 3 cities in India. (https://www.samridhhealth.org/program-portfolio/)