Senphonix's second federal grant in weeks targets the software side of wearable vitals monitoring

Senphonix has received a Small Business Innovation Research Phase I award from the National Institutes of Health, made through the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, to advance SleeveSense, its investigational upper-arm wearable platform for continuous, long-term vital-sign monitoring.

The award is the company's second federal research grant in a matter of weeks. It follows a National Science Foundation STTR Phase I award announced in September, which supports development of SleeveSense's wireless hardware and software platform. Together the two grants split the engineering problem: the NSF money goes toward the device and platform build, while the NIH funding is earmarked for clinical-environment testing of the software stack, cloud and database scaling, and cybersecurity work toward SOC 2 Type II readiness.

That is a deliberate emphasis on the unglamorous layer of a monitoring product. SleeveSense is being designed as an upper-arm wearable that could continuously track vital signs for days, weeks or months across hospital and at-home settings, and to integrate with existing clinical workflows by making patient information available through electronic health records. The company is aiming at a longstanding workflow gap: vital signs are typically collected manually and intermittently. Senphonix says continuous monitoring could reduce nursing workload while giving clinicians more information about how a patient's condition changes between routine checks. After discharge, the device is intended to keep collecting data while patients view their vital signs through a mobile app.

Commercially, Senphonix plans to manage the underlying infrastructure itself and offer the platform to hospitals on a per-patient pricing model rather than requiring an upfront capital purchase.

"The barrier has never really been the sensor; it's been building something hospitals can actually put to work and doing it with no upfront cost for them to try," said Mike Haldane, co-founder and co-CEO of Senphonix. "We designed SleeveSense to reduce manual workload and fit the way care teams already operate, with a light footprint and the clinical-grade accuracy we are validating in testing. NIH's support helps us get the software clinically ready as we work toward bringing SleeveSense to market following FDA clearance."

Senphonix has also drawn support from Microsoft, the Arizona Commerce Authority through the WearTech Applied Research Center, and the University of Arizona. Alongside the federal awards, the company points to company-sponsored national research in which 98% of surveyed nurses (402 respondents) and 94% of surveyed healthcare CFOs (457 respondents) said they would support adopting SleeveSense within their organizations. The surveys were administered by MarketWise Advising, whose founder and president, Mike Haldane, is also Senphonix's co-founder and co-CEO.