Most remote-monitoring tools have the same failure mode: they bury clinicians in alerts until the alerts stop meaning anything. Respiree, a digital health company founded in Singapore in 2019, took the opposite approach. Its pitch, in the words of founder and CEO Gurpreet Singh, is blunt - "What we need is better use of data, not just more data."
The company builds two things that are usually sold separately: hardware and intelligence. On the hardware side is a small, FDA-cleared chest patch - the RS001 - that measures heart rate, respiration and temperature continuously, paired with a fingertip oximeter for blood-oxygen readings. On the intelligence side is 1Bio, an AI platform that folds those sensor streams together with electronic health record data, mobile questionnaires and third-party devices to track how a patient's cardio-pulmonary health is trending over time.
The payoff Respiree describes is timing. For conditions like COPD and heart failure, the system aims to detect deterioration - the slow slide toward a flare-up or a hospital admission - not hours or minutes in advance, but days. That head start is the entire value proposition: a warning early enough for a clinician to actually do something about it.
Respiree grew out of A*STAR, Singapore's national research agency, and it carries that lineage. Singh holds a PhD in electrical and electronic engineering from Nanyang Technological University and did a post-doctoral stint at MIT in integrated photonics before turning his attention to health sensors. The company reads less like a consumer-wearable startup and more like a medical-device firm that happens to run on machine learning.
