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.