HydraClip
An ear-worn hydration sensor for nurses, because every wearable that could tell them is banned by the PPE policy.
- Role
- Chief Technology Officer
- Status
- Paused
- Team
- Four people; I was CTO
- Stage
- Paused
- Results
- Audience Choice, Pitch Battles
- 1 of 9, ventures picked from 42 for the Panther Pitch final
- Stack
- TypeScript
- React Native
- Expo
- Next.js
- Supabase
The problem
70% of nurses finish a shift dehydrated. The obvious wearables that could tell them, an Apple Watch or a Fitbit, are worn on the wrist, and hospital hygiene and PPE protocols make a wrist wearable unusable on a ward.
We moved the device to the ear. It is light, discreet, stays off the hands and does not interfere with the uniform or glove protocol.
We did not guess at the problem. We interviewed 30+ healthcare professionals and built from what they told us.
"Yes, dehydration is an issue and can be seen in the form of thirst, or dry skin/lips… We all struggle to quench the thirst that builds up from working in dry buildings and wearing masks."
Lanea Harris, Employee Health Nurse, Occupational Health, Safety & Wellness
The numbers
- of nurses are dehydrated by the end of a shiftNCBI
- 70%
- leaving the profession annuallyPEI Nurses' Union
- 47%
- lost annually to nurse turnovernursesunion.ca
- $7.8M
- annual cost to the healthcare systemResearchGate
- $17–29B
- body-weight dehydration is enough to degrade mood, attention and memoryArmstrong et al., Journal of Nutrition 142(2), 2012
- 2%
- healthcare professionals interviewed: primary research, not a literature reviewOur own fieldwork
- 30+
- per unit, against $500–800 for the nearest alternativesOur own costing
- $50
How it works
Sense
The ear-clip reads hydration-related signals; we scoped near-infrared light, skin conductance and sweat sensing.
Detect
On signs of dehydration risk it gives a gentle vibration or a soft tone. No screen, no interruption to workflow.
Track
A companion app holds notification settings and personal hydration history.
Aggregate
An organisational dashboard shows staff hydration trends in aggregate only, so individual privacy is preserved.
The fourth step carries the design decision. A wellness device that reports to an employer is a surveillance problem. The dashboard shows aggregate trends only, and individual privacy is preserved.
What we built: the dashboard and the app got as far as screens on mock data. No real sensor data ever ran through them.
The sensing side lived in a lab notebook first. We surveyed the usual vital-sign sensors, then scoped three for hydration: near-infrared light, because water absorbs specific wavelengths and tissue water can be read from how the signal changes; skin conductance, cheap and sensitive to skin moisture; and a sweat sensor for electrolytes and sweat rate. The estimate itself would combine heart rate, temperature, sweat and activity. The same pages list why it is hard: a weak signal, big differences between people, skin thickness, blood flow and temperature all getting in the way.
Where it stopped
HydraClip is paused. The demand is real and the numbers above hold up. What we did not have was the footing to carry a medical device into the healthcare system: a student team, working on this alongside everything else, in a landscape of regulation and clinical validation we were not equipped for. It was not the right time for this product, or we were not yet the team to take it there.
Outcome
Audience Choice Award at Pitch Battles. Finalist at the Panther Pitch, one of 9 ventures chosen from 42.
The business plan's first market was a pilot with 30 nurses at a Charlottetown long-term care facility, through Health PEI and the PEI Nurses' Union.