Aifloo, a Swedish startup that sells a ‘smart wristband’ to help care for the elderly, raises €5.1M

Aifloo, a Swedish startup that combines hardware sensors and AI to offer a ‘smart wristband’ to help care for the elderly, has raised €5.1 million in new funding.

The Series A round is led by EQT Ventures, with the VC firm’s Analytics Partner, Henrik Landgren, citing the team and technology as reasons to invest, noting that the e-health company is marrying “vast amounts of data and modern AI” to help elderly people remain living independently for longer.

Founded by Felix Etzler, Michael Collaros and Anders Widgren in 2015, Aifloo is described as an e-health system designed to improve the quality of life for the elderly and provide peace of mind for relatives and caregivers.

The hardware is a wristband packed full of sensors and the AI monitors the wearer’s behaviour so as to alert caregivers of any potentials issues. These are cited as things like trips or falls, alterations in eating habits, and changes in sleep behaviour.

“Aifloo is a completely new e-health system that continually learns about an individual’s behavior – detecting if something is wrong,” explains Etzler. “We help seniors to keep going strong, give peace of mind to family and friends and augment the care delivered by professional caregivers”.

The idea, says the Aifloo founder, is to “digitalize detection of human behaviour in a non-intrusive way”. Specifically, the Aifloo wristband is conceived as a discreet wearable with a long battery life, whilst the real-time cloud AI-analysis does the heavy lifting.

“The service measures trends over time, detects emergencies and alerts people of a problem even if you’re unable to,” he says. “We hope to help carers deliver the right care, at the right time, to those who need it the most, with a little help from technology”.

That, argues Etzler, is very different to the status quo in which the systems used in care are outdated. “A lot of resource goes into manual surveillance,” he says, while more modern solutions are “expensive, not customisable to the individual, or complicated”.

“On the other hand, wearables are targeting the young and healthy or focused on one medical condition, such as diabetes. We’ve created an individualized, durable, easy to use, long-lived solution to a complex problem and packaged it in a nice, wearer friendly product and service”.

To that end, an early customer of Aifloo is Aleris, one of the leading healthcare companies in Scandinavia. Etzler says the next step is begin marketing the service to in-home care companies.