There are screening laboratory tests, home diagnostic devices and test stripes. Test strips and glucometers are dominating the in-home market segment. Toilet integrated products are in various R&D phases. Our competitive advantages are full automation and continuous monitoring, as well as low price.
Screening laboratory tests are a gold-standard methods and currently dominates the market. Require skilled operators, scheduling, infrastructure, human initiation, and are often intrusive and expensive. Even if tests are taken with exceptional regularity, it is challenging to consider historical data and gain insights due to interoperability issues.
Laboratory screening brands like Alere, ARKRAY, Bio-Rad, Mindray, Roche Diagnostics, and Siemens dominate this market. Samples analyzed in a lab provide accurate results; however, they have a wide list of disadvantages from the preventive care perspective. The biggest is the high prices and the need to visit a hospital.
Inside the laboratory screening segment, there are innovative
Solutions such as Owlstone Medical, Fossilion Tech, Syft.
https://www.owlstonemedical.com/
https://www.fossiliontech.com/
https://2020.h2clab.com/
Some of them are also based on the principle of detecting VOC biomarkers. From the technology perspective, to detect similar biomarkers as we do, they are typically using different variations of mass spectrometry (MS) analysis. MS-based methods can very accurately detect and identify VOCs; however, the measurements are time-consuming, expensive, and depend on a skilled operator, and also performed only in clinical settings. Even though some of these companies declare the potential of applying their solutions as home point-of-care, they are still mainly focused on increasing laboratory performance.
The main competitors in the home point-of-care segment are screening solutions based on biological sensors.
https://www.scanwellhealth.com/
https://assayme.cc/
https://healthy.io/
These devices are partially automated but still require human initiation, which is a serious threat to the regularity of screening. Many of them need maintenance and cartridge replacement.
Test stripes are gold solution for in home monitoring. However, they are manual and have huge challenges with data interpretation and aggregation.
Products designed to analyze urine using other sensing technologies are at different stages of R&D and are not commercially available yet. For instance, Japanese manufacturers of toilets, Toto and Matsushita, are widely known for taking several significant steps towards creating WiFi-connected toilets. However, these are also currently under development.
