Tatch rethinks HST

NEW YORK – Tatch, a startup that has developed a flexible, smart wearable patch for home sleep testing, has the potential to make great strides in diagnosing the nearly 30 million people with obstructive sleep apnea in the U.S., clearing the way for more treatment, CEO Amir Reuveny says.

“There are a few barriers to getting good care in sleep,” said Reuveny, who first started the company as part of the Runway Startup program at Cornell Tech. “Sleep labs are the gold standard but expensive and inaccessible, while home sleep testing equipment is still cumbersome and prone to errors. I felt flexible electronics could really make a change.”

The patch is attached to a user’s torso while they’re sleeping, picking up on key signals and metrics, to gather data on sleeping habits. All the data is then wirelessly transferred via the cloud to a sleep physician, who can provide a diagnosis and develop a treatment plan.

Tatch, which secured $4.25 million in seed funding led by Spark Capital in 2020, is currently going through the regulatory process for approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, with the goal of going to market some time in 2021.

“We still have more clinical studies that are ongoing to collect more data and support different claims,” Reuveny said. “We are also doing some user experience testing. We feel that the current user experience for sleep patients is not too great. We want to make sure the Tatch product journey provides the best user experience possible.” 

Tatch will likely go to market with a direct-to-consumer business model, Reuveny says, with plans in the works to serve not only people who already have prescriptions for sleep tests but also people who seek to obtain prescriptions virtually.

“Sleep medicine is really inaccessible,” he said. “The ratio between the number of sleep clinics to people in the U.S. is more than one to 50,000, so it’s very difficult to find a sleep lab, especially if you don’t live in a big city.”

For HME providers, the major benefit of a company like Tatch gaining traction is the trickle-down benefit of increased prescriptions for CPAP therapy, but it also has a wow factor, says one provider, Woody O’Neal.

“I’m just fascinated by progress and technology,” said O’Neal, vice president of O2 Neal Medical, who has a patch to test run. “The age-old question is, when will home sleep testing reach some sort of critical mass, and that’s something I’m fascinated by. Assuming this gets the stamp of approval as a medical device, how marketable will it become?”  hme