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Creation of an Wearable Startup: From a Laboratory Incubator to a Revenue Generating Business

Abstract

The need to understand signals given by our own body is of great interest to most human beings. This quest for self-knowledge is both shared by academic researchers and businesses who want to bring value to consumers in the society. This paper presents a story of how a software engineering researcher who collaborated with hardware engineers and entrepreneurs in an incubator, Simula Garage, hosted by Simula Research Laboratory to create a wearable startup called Sweetzpot. Sweetzpot developed a respiratory inductance plethysomography sensor called Flow to measure breathing signals from ribcage and/or abdominal movements. The team grew to consist of software engineers, students of machine learning and physics, an industrial/interaction designer, a hardware engineer, a lawyer, and an accountant in addition to external collaborators. We present the sequence of events that led to creation and sustainability of the startup and summarize the lessons learnt from it.

Category

Academic chapter

Language

English

Author(s)

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Digital / Sustainable Communication Technologies
  • Simula Research Laboratory

Year

2020

Publisher

ACM Publications

Book

ICSEW'20: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops

ISBN

9781450379632

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository