How to Build Healthcare Tech That Earns Trust

Speaker 1: I came to it from a daughter's perspective. So I knew what the patient felt like and then I brought the neuroscience on top of it. But I did meet a lot of clinicians, caregivers. I did as much interviews as possible to understand the need to get that product

Speaker 2: to market fit is really important. I'm Melanie Bar. Welcome back to the Sheba podcast, your go-to place to empower you to live the life and business that you crave. I'm here to talk about everything from having the courage to make life and career leads to the details of how to lead effectively, create successful teams, implement strategies for growth, and infuse tech innovation. I'm here to celebrate your wins and navigate through your challenges. I live in the city now, but I grew up in a town of a thousand people. I've navigated major life leaps, a senior level corporate career, worked in professional sports, and now as a successful entrepreneur who loves business, technology, family, and making meaningful connections with you and the She Built It Community. I also love a good workout and dose of self-care.

Speaker 2: Magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy. So, turn up the audio, open your favorite notes app, grab your favorite drink, and here we go. Welcome to She Built It. I'm your host, Melanie Bar. Maheen, thank you so much

Speaker 1: for being here. Thank you for inviting

Speaker 2: me. You are a Stamford neuroscientist who chose to build a company. What made you decide that building not just research is the best way to create change?

Speaker 1: As researchers and as scientists, when we are going through our training, we are told that publish or perish. We're so focused on trying to publish whatever we find in these really amazing journals that only have reach to the academia and to the community. So there's no pushing it forward to the lay people. However, in the last 10 years or more, I've noticed that there's way more interest in science, especially brain health. And a lot of everyday publications that we read online, especially reals, are very focused on what we find. So we do have YouTube videos that do get into our research, but there still is not hands on immediate impact in the community. So if I'm working on something that I can actually put in the hands of the patient really fast in a very commercial way, I feel like I've really served my purpose for science because science should work for everybody. It really is completely agnostic to anything other than the human body. Creating a company that can provide a solution in the hands of the patient and the caregiver and the provider immediately that they can download and use. That's impact.

Speaker 2: You're right. And reals are so fast. They're quick moments in time. And maybe we need a little bit more than that. We do. Share with us more about who you are, what you've built with Seuss Solutions and the problem you're solving.

Speaker 1: Sure. I'm originally from Pakistan and I came here when I was 19 and I have gone through all of my academic route with different universities getting my PhD and my master's and bachelors and all that and I did my posttock at Stanford after my PhD in neuroscience and I stayed there because I got involved with Veterans Affairs Palo Alto and I've been in those dual positions for about 20 years now. So I'm currently directing a woman's health centers research and also a clinical professor in neurosurgery at Stanford and my background is neuroscience meaning I'm a PhD not an MD but I've always studied the brain and always found it absolutely fascinating because it's the only organ in the body that can literally change the way you dream if you stimulate it. I've been studying eye movements and traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer's with neuroiming and all that for 20 years and about three years ago I was doing a faculty fellowship at the biodesign school at Stanford and Stanford really encourages innovation and ideas that doctors have that they can take it to market so that again you can have a bigger impact than to the patient and the provider and caregivers. So I came up with this idea of creating a solution for communication for people who cannot speak. Giving voice to the voiceless is how you would say it. And it is interesting because it was something that happened with my father in 2007.

Father's stroke

Speaker 1: He had a stroke and he had a fasia right afterwards. And within 3 days he was diagnosed with depression. He could not communicate at all and it took him 15 minutes to ask for a glass of water and it was devastating for the whole family.

Speaker 1: But now that I'm doing this, I know that it was more devastating to me from the perspective of I had just finished my PhD in neuroscience and I really thought I understood the brain and I couldn't help my father and it really did affect me in a very grieving way but at the same time I wanted to do something about it but obviously I couldn't. And when they asked me for an idea to create a company, I wanted to have something that could be immediately offuse and I didn't want to create a device. I didn't want to go through the FDA route.

Speaker 1: I wanted something that people could use. So I used the camera and the iPad and I worked with a company to create a solution with the programming the AI enabled so that we can use the eye tracking to measure eye movements as well as head movements and use them so that you can capture things from the screen of an iPad by a patient and they can throw it from the iPad to the caregivers's phone and that way if you needed a glass of water or anything we don't have a stimulus library we have whatever you want. So I can put my daughter's picture on the screen and my eyes will pick it up and take that picture and give it to the caregiver saying I want to see my daughter and it measures your eye movements and your head movements and then we can gather some personal health data in terms of like how good your movements are and that could be a detection of some sort like in terms of your eye health and everything is very need-based. So we decided that we would be able to actually capture how involved the caregiver is which is really making this application not just very patient oriented but actually very businessoriented. This is B2B marketing.

Speaker 1: So we can target nursing homes and rehab hospitals because they're always looking to provide better care for their patients. And if you can measure what the caregiver is able to do during the day, how many needs can be measured that they're meeting, that's a really good thing. It's a needsbased score. It's a needs assessment. So that's really what

Speaker 2: we're doing. That's so interesting. A lot of listeners probably don't know this, but I'm also in the senior housing industry. And so to think about that type of support and to be able to help your father in that way has to be so incredible for you.

Speaker 1: He actually passed away within a year of having his stroke. And that was that really it really devastated me. And I always say this is like we should always talk about our problems. We should always communicate with other people about what we're going through. And the reason why is because I grieved on my own about all this for years until I realized when I found out that when you do have a stroke and you have aphasia afterwards and you're a caregiver, it really affects you and you're personalizing your story and you're talking to your family, you're talking to your friends just within yourself, right? But then after years of grieving about it and when the right time came, I don't do particularly stroke research.

Speaker 1: I'm not a stroke neurologist or anything like that. I'm a neuroscientist. I know how it works, but I stayed away from it cuz it was traumatic for me. And then you get to the point where you actually look at the epidemiology of it. And you figure out how many people have gone through this. How many people are there that have a stroke and cannot talk? Every year close to 175,000 people in the United States have stroke with aphasia. New ones. Not talking about the ones who are going through rehab.

Target conditions

Speaker 1: There's ALS. There's MS, there's neurodedevelopmental disorders, there's kids who cannot speak between the ages of 5 to 17 or they when they should be speaking between 5 to 17. They need all these special eds. And I think it's really important to understand and that's one of the things that I learned in my classes that were nonclinical and non-ressearch is the business side of things. What is the need? So, it wasn't just my dad. the need was much bigger and that's what I want to address is take it to market because there's people like my father and there's people like me and my mother or my brothers who the whole family just devastated because communication is a human right and hundreds of thousands of people that

Speaker 2: you could be helping tell us more about the business process and the data behind it and how you're able to use that data so let's go back to some basics on this so are all three of Our apps are on Apple App Store right now. So they're on

Speaker 1: a premium. So you can download them. Our programmer will be contacted and you will be able to use the basic package without any fee and we will charge in a little bit but right now we're letting people use it. We are FDA approved to be used as a communication solution. We are also backed by Stanford so we are ready to sell. We are also reaching out to our bigger communities, nursing homes. So we have about three pilots that are going on. So we're trying to collect data in three different institutes. One of them is children pediatrics department at Aakhan University in Pakistan because I'm a visiting professor there. It's an IRB approved project. So we're trying to have children use it. We are also starting a pilot in Kansas City and it's St. Luke's Hospital and we are working on an IRB proposal there. They've said yes. They've given us a wonderful letter and we are starting a study there. We also have a study that we are working on with Berlingame senior care. So you can see I'm attacking both ends of the spectrum neurodedevelopmental and elderly care. This kind of work has huge impact in terms of lots of different ways we can use it but as long as we use it for communication right now that would be the best way to go. It is a software basically digital health. So it is a SAS model. So we get the basic package and then after that you can keep adding things to it. As we gather the data the for B2B the main data is needs assessment score which is about how many times does the caregiver actually go and meet the needs of the patient give them what they need. And once that is done, then you basically are able to show that not to just your business partners in the community and say, "Hey, we've got this innovative way of in our nursing home that we can actually measure how caregivers are doing, but you can also give it to your insurance companies and say, look, this is an important thing."

Speaker 1: Right now we don't have insurance to pay for it. But as we gather the data, we should be able to convince the insurance to pay for it because we will be able to provide the quality of life both to the caregiver and the patient and we will have better needs met. In fact, one of our nursing homes was like, we would like to put this in our flyer because we're so digitally AI oriented. So that's where we're at. And I think the actual solution, the communication solution actually grows with you. So like I said, you can add your own pictures in it. You can use your fingers to touch if your hands are working. Most sometimes when stroke happens, most of the time your if it's left hemisphere stroke, your right hand doesn't work, which is why I used eyes. So if your eyes cannot pick it up or your hands are working, you can use your fingers, but it still tracks your eyes and your head movements. So that's our model right now. We would like to sell it directly to patients with a price if they want, but our main strategy right now is B2D and it'll be like a certain amount of money for 12 licenses for each facility.

Speaker 2: And if someone wanted to go to your

Speaker 1: apps, what are they?

Speaker 1: So they're called SOF solutions and there's three apps. One is for patient which works on the iPad and two are for iPhones for provider and caregiver.

Speaker 1: We're also working on moving it to Android, which is really important for use in other countries that are not as well off and don't have Apple as much.

Speaker 1: And you can download it and it's available on Apple right now. And the good thing about it is that it's quite easy to use. We have an AI chat box in it. We also have a programmer who is able to answer all kinds of questions and it's easy to use. That is something that we are very proud of because a lot of the devices and a lot of apps that are out there for people who cannot speak takes a long time for them to learn. They're also very expensive. A lot of them are their own devices with amazing eye trackers, but that means you just have to carry another device with you. And there's also no communication with the caregiver a lot of the times.

Speaker 1: So I don't like to say that, oh, I'm using AI because AI is just like a buzzword. I'm using AI because I'm bringing humans together because everything you do every day is you and the phone. But I like to say that our soup solutions brings people together.

Speaker 1: That's what the logo is. It's three people holding hands. There's no AI in it. Three people are holding hands because AI brings them together and it doesn't do anything despite anything like that. And you're helping the patients because you're helping people to be able to speak, but then you're also bringing in that data which is really interesting because I've never heard of anything like that being tried or the ability to be evaluated because everyone wants the best care.

Speaker 2: Exactly. Now, preventive care, best care

Speaker 1: to be able to So, I don't say diagnose, I say detect. And detect which is complimentary to whatever the doctor's doing, whatever the ER is doing. I'm not going to say, "Hey, I detected." I'm going to say it's going to either make it quicker or it's going to create a warning sign that's going to help lead to better solutions, better outcomes, better quality of life. Now, it is so cool for us to think about the eye. The eyes are amazing. The eyes are I love eyes, not just because of makeup, but I love makeup, but it's important to know it's a beautiful feature of your face. And if you look at any poetry from at least in my language or in other languages, eyes are always talked about because it's the entrance to your soul or whatever, eyes are part of your brain. And a lot of marketing strategies, a lot of personality, a lot of leadership classes are about how you look at other people like how what your eyes are saying because eyes are part of your brain. So I know that eye tracking has been studied for years in neuroscience and I've been advising companies. have published papers in it and I think it's an amazing thing to look at the back of the eye to look at multiple sclerosis to look at the back of the eye for amaloid for Alzheimer's and other movements for how it moves the for traumatic brain injury but it can also be used as a way to communicate without speaking you would say her eyes told the story you know all that stuff like there is a way to actually gather the XYZ coordinates of your eye to actually have an eye health or that you can see changes happen in every day based on your body, based what your brain is feeling. And maybe that's a way to detect changes in the body. That's so interesting because the eyes do say a lot.

Speaker 2: Yeah, they do. And I know you take it a step further from what we see visually. I also think about how we think and how that approaches business. how we can wire our brains to think in a certain way in business situations and to grow our business and to have a growth mindset.

Speaker 1: Empathy is a really new thing in the business world compared to like how it used to be in the 80s and '9s, you know, and even in 2000. Empathy is something that is really important for today's leadership and it comes from really reading the room and re understanding the other person. And I'm old enough to like curb my anger. I won't say enthusiasm because I like to be enthusiastic. I love to show how excited I am about science, about the work that I'm doing, or about anything really. I get excited about customized tailoring. It's important to show the excitement and the opportunities that are out there. But when it's negativity, your eyes can really tell. And I don't have a poker face, but that's one of the things that people who who are very good at dealing with business, their eyes can they can mask movements of their eyes in a way that people can understand that.

Speaker 1: It's interesting when you think about

Speaker 2: working through negativity. I haven't

Speaker 1: ever thought about how eye movement correlates to that. Yeah, there's a lot of data out there about eye movement correlating with mood, depression, attention deficit disorders, focus. There's some relationship to particular genetic variants that we have that make us proverate more that may give us tunnel vision. Once we get going on this in terms of gathering the data, the things that you can do is it's amazing.

Speaker 1: It's so interesting. I have large eyes and I've always been asked, especially when I was younger, if I was scared. I'm like, "No, I'm not scared. I just have round eyes." But I do see how the data in relating to places like senior housing or nursing homes and how valuable that data can be as it relates to healthcare as well. The first time I visited a nursing home, I think I was 21 years old. I'd been here for 2 years and it was very shocking to me cuz in my culture, there's no such thing as nursing homes. It's not necessarily a good thing. A lot of people are not able to take care of their parents. They don't have the income to do it and there's a lot of bad things that can happen. So, there's good and bad on both sides. It's just I'd not seen a nursing home before and it was actually a very nice nursing home in Selenus, but it really affected me.

Speaker 2: It's interesting to think about how we

Speaker 1: can improve quality of life.

Improving quality of life

Speaker 1: Yes. And because none of us are getting any younger, you're in the still ways to pull up socks when you can't bend down. and how do you pull them up? There's all these physical needs that can be met by making all these physical devices like these. But now we have digital AI solutions that can help you communicate.

Speaker 1: You could say, "Hey, I need someone to put my socks on." So you could just click on socks and they'll come put your socks on.

Speaker 1: As Sou grows, how do you think about innovation, product development, and growth without losing sight of the patient? as a business person, as an entrepreneur, I would like my solution to be used all the time. One of the questions I get is like, hey, what if they start speaking and how will you make sure that they keep using? So we have different ways of adding bells and whistles to the solution and we have stuff up our sleeves that I can't talk about but it is a way of making sure we retain the customer, we keep the customer because the app becomes part of your life because it's on the phone.

Speaker 1: It's not an extra device. It becomes part of your life. Like how many times do you check your bank account every day or how many times do you go to WhatsApp? I want it to be one of that background app that actually runs and you just use it for everything. You want to go to Netflix, you go through Sof, you click on the icon of Netflix in Sof because your eyes can't you can't speak. So that's how I would want it to be like I want it to be used like that and it would grow with you because it we can add things to it. We can add AI voices to it. We can add therapy to it. The provider can download homework onto it.

Home therapy and apps

Speaker 1: They can have calendar on it. So they one of the things that this speech language pathologist once told me that she visits this child at home for therapy every 2 weeks and she gives homework on an iPad to the child and they put it in her drawer every time she leaves. And when she comes back two weeks later, they take it out of the door in front of her. LMR looks at it for two weeks. But if you have SOF, the provider has the app in front of them.

Speaker 1: They can check every day. They can download homework. It's just more interactive. It's more It's basically what we do in school now. My daughter is a junior. She's got four AP classes.

Speaker 1: She's going crazy. And you see how they study now, how everything is monitored. That's how we are when we work. So why can't we be like that when we're older and retired?

Speaker 2: That's so true. The other thing that you mentioned is it's good that there's not another device because you're right, we don't need additional devices. No, because you want one thing that you have in front of you that you can just use as much as you can.

Speaker 2: What is the biggest mistake founders make when building in a regulated space like healthcare?

Speaker 1: Not talking to enough people, not doing enough research, thinking you know. A lot of people are like, "Oh, you're a scientist, so you must know." No, I don't. I study the human brain. It's the most complex organ in the body. It's the entire universe. And neuroscientists are probably should be the most humble scientists in the world because we really don't understand it. And I think that if I had to go to other people to really understand business terms, really understand a lot of the clinical side of things cuz I'm a researcher. I can tell you about the human brain. But learning about the patient, the good thing about it is that I didn't come to this from the neuroscience perspective. I came to it from a daughter's perspective. So I knew what the patient felt like. And then I brought the neuroscience on top of it. But I did meet a lot of clinicians. I met a lot of caregivers. I did as much interviews as possible to understand the need. So I think that is important to get that product to market fit is really important. That mold of breaking that first customer. We're trying to get customers right now. We're trying to raise money right now and founders like myself, I'm the CEO. We are pulled in so many directions and none of those things are easy. They're new. I mean, you're very skilled and educated and knowledgeable in your but no one is good at everything and you're so smart to keep questioning. you have to question and right now we're raising and that's another thing I wanted to say is we are crowdfunding at the moment for another two months and we're doing it at start engine and it's a great platform because it allows people to to follow us allows people to see how we're growing and for little money you can actually be part of the company in a small way to see how we can actually go to market and make revenue and it'll you'll be part of it because my company is a very commercial communal company and it's for the patient rather than something that is maybe just like hanging out with people in the market and more towards business. I want it to be in the hands

Speaker 2: of the patients. What brings you the

Speaker 1: most joy in what you're doing today? Seeing people speak when they can't speak. It's amazing. It brings tears to my eyes because I always say like have these billboards in SF when you're driving and there's all these AI billboards and all these product and Salesforce and I want a tiny billboard there whatever and it says can't talk su that's it'll be there one day it will happen I hope so I really hope so neuroscience

Speaker 2: to bring it to life yes thank you so much for joining us today please share with us again how and where we can find

Speaker 1: you. My company is called Sufsolutions which is sofolutions. Sufsolutions.com. You can also look for my name Amahin Masu Adamson. And my apps are on all three apps. Sufolutions, Suf Caregiver, and Suf Provider. All three of them are on Apple App Store.

Speaker 1: We're also on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and we're on X.

Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us today. I'd love to hear from you. Reach out to me at hello@ shebuiltit.com on our shebiltit website or at she built it on social.

Speaker 1: Thank you to my editor, Rich Duffelino, who always makes us sound good. Until next time, let nothing stop you from experiencing effectively business that you crave.