HEALTH IS WEALTH

A CLUTCH OF COMPANIES IS BUILDING INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES TO SERVE THE GLOBAL HEALTHCARE/ PHARMA MARKET FROM INDIA, WITH THE U.S. BEING THE BIGGEST MARKET. WHAT LIES AHEAD?

- BY JOE C. MATHEW

WHEN JO AGGARWAL and Ramakant Vempati chucked their peripatetic careers as non-resident Indians and returned to Bengaluru to be with Vempati’s ageing father a decade ago, the couple thought: Why not set up a company specialising in elder care for those who could not return to India? Aggarwal, a technocrat, and Vempati, a finance expert, built a platform that would send alerts about elders in India to their children anywhere in the world. “We tried to build something that initially could be an alert mechanism to tell you if your elderly people are moving or static,” says Vempati.

Touchkin eServices was born. But remember the idiom ‘break a leg’ wishing someone good luck? The couple realised that the ecosystem was not geared to cater to your father back home if he had fallen and broken his leg, alert or not.

Touchkin’s prototype died, but its simple chatbot survived. It asked your dad questions such as ‘How are you feeling today?’ The couple tracked responses, phone usage patterns, and mobility patterns. “We realised that their depression scores kept going down, and we can track it with 85-90% accuracy. We spoke to experts, and they said; ‘look, when you ask somebody how they are, even if it’s a chatbot doing the asking, it is therapeutic,’” Vempati says. “That’s when the penny dropped.” The money lay in companionship, not helping with a broken leg from another continent.

Wysa, their mental health app, was a hit when it was launched in 2016. It uses clinically validated artificial intelligence for counselling as the first step and human coaching for those who need more. And not just for the elderly but for everyone.

The US has 40% of Wysa’s users. Among Wysa’s clients and partners are Bosch, Colgate-Palmolive, Harvard Medical School, Columbia University, Swiss Re and Aetna. Wysa’s 120-member team is mostly in Bengaluru.