Why the mouth may be the best window into human health: Aidar Health’s MouthLab

Sathya Elumalai (0:03)

We set out to look at this in a different way. What if we didn't have to go to a lab at all? Because in our case, two of the richest window into a human body, isn't a wrist or a finger or a ring, but it's actually the mouth, because we have access to breath and saliva, which is kind of considered the mirror of the body.

So that's where we are going, and that's why we are different.

Logan Plaster (0:37)

Sathya Elumalai, CEO and founder of Aidar Health. Thanks for joining me here at StartUp Health.

Sathya Elumalai (0:42)

Hi, Logan. Great to see you, and thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure to reconnect with you.

Logan Plaster (0:48)

It's been a pleasure and a benefit of what I do to get to watch Aidar Health grow and change over many, many years. And so we want to get a snapshot of where you are today in 2026 and some of the issues around what you're building, this new type of biometric device, hardware plus software, and we'll get into exactly what that is. But start by giving us just a glimpse of what the product and what the Aidar Health platform looks like right now.

Sathya Elumalai (1:15)

Absolutely. I mean, I kind of demoed our product many times in your podcast and probably StartUp Health is the only organization which has seen the evolution from an idea all the way to a commercialization.

So in a nutshell, we built more like a breathalyzer. It's a hand-held medical device. The user actually breathe into the device and we collect around 10 vital health parameters in under a minute. And we also look into taking that data and then providing essentially an intelligence where we provide a health index. So we take all the data and create an health index, which will help physicians and care managers to essentially understand what's happening with somebody's health a few days in advance, sometimes weeks in advance, so that we can predict and prevent a potential harm or hospitalization early. Okay.

Logan Plaster (2:07)

Well, with things like our ring, with Whoop and Apple Watch, people are getting more and more accustomed to the idea of constant monitoring of their health metrics. So help us understand how a breath-based monitor that you'd use at home is different from me just having an aura ring on one of these other commercial devices.

Sathya Elumalai (2:27)

Yeah. I think if you see everybody in health right now wants to own a lab. As you mentioned, even Whoop, our ring, they all tried to collect information from-

Logan Plaster (2:37)

When you say own a lab, what do you mean?

Sathya Elumalai (2:39)

Basically, they all wanted to get additional information. Because whatever we're collecting biophysical measurements is only limited, especially when it comes to a variable.

These are things also worn on the, for example, wearing a Whoop, it's worn on the wrist and mostly pigmentation. So shining a light and collecting information becomes a little bit more harder, while it's on the surface. Also, you can only collect so much information. So what all these companies are doing today is, they're sending a kid home and then having the user collect their blood and send it to a lab, or actually they're giving information so that they can go to one of these third-party labs like LabCorp or others. With all due respect, I love what these companies are building and they essentially brought the people into getting a better care or they gave them that mentality that I need to take care of my health. But heart rate movement alone is not going to add any value. We need to look into the real chemistry of the body, like how the lung, the kidneys, the metabolism of every single person for which we need a lab, we need invasive data from them.

So that's why we set out to look at this in a different way. What if we didn't have to go to a lab at all? Because in our case, two of the richest window into a human body, isn't a wrist or a finger for a ring, but it's actually the mouth because we have access to breath and saliva, which is considered the mirror of the body. So that's where we are going and that's why we are different.

Logan Plaster (4:17)

So it's a more complex constellation of data and it's closer to getting lab tests than just an or a ring. Is it like orders of magnitude more? I mean, if I'm just going to compare the biometric data I'm getting from a watch to the MouthLab, what kind of scale of difference are we talking about?