Home monitoring solution for chronic kidney disease and heart failure patients

More than 700 million patients worldwide suffer from chronic heart or kidney disease and about a third of these patients is suffering from dangerous potassium imbalances. For those patients, potassium is an important parameter that can derail due to medication with kidney-stimulating or antihypertensive drugs or due to nutrition.

Both elevated and decreased potassium concentrations are dangerous and can lead to cardiac arrhythmia or even cardiac arrest. If potassium imbalances occur, patients often have to be hospitalized, and important cardio-renal therapies have to be interrupted and readjusted.

So far, there is no way for these chronically seriously ill patients to monitor their potassium concentration independently and at home.

The solution is a therapy guiding, simple, though highly accurate home diagnostics system that empowers heart failure and chronic kidney disease patients to frequently self-check their blood potassium levels.

Our disruptive PotassiumForMe home monitoring system empowers patients to take control of their health. By enabling self-monitoring of potassium levels, patients can proactively adjust nutrition, manage medications, and prevent severe complications. This leads to significantly improved prognosis, enhanced quality of life, and a reduction in hospitalizations.

With >PotassiumForMe< we are solving an unmet clinical need. Currently, there is no device available on the market allowing patients to self-monitor potassium levels at home.

Currently, checking blood potassium values requires a visit to a physician’s office or clinic, a venous blood draw, and often significant additional delay until lab results are received and therapy or nutrition can then eventually be adjusted.

Our system enables patients to monitor their blood potassium levels self-reliant at home from a single drop of capillary fingerprick blood. This is similar to the already well-known blood glucose measurements for diabetes management.

The product features two main parts: a handheld readout device and a potassium-sensitive test-strip. The single-use test strip uses simple microfluidics and optical detection to measure potassium and doesn’t require user calibration.

The device enables integration to telemedical and digital health platforms to support patients and reduce clinic visits.

Frequent self-monitoring of potassium concentrations could detect derailments in the potassium balance at an early stage and avoid complications and hospitalizations. Medication could be adjusted and appropriate corrective measures to normalize the potassium balance could immediately be taken.