If you’re a watch enthusiast, you probably don’t want to exchange your prized timepiece for a bulky fitness tracker. But Hiyd founder Salah Batroukh doesn’t think people should have to sacrifice fashion for function.
“We don’t think that health tracking needs to be this overly conscious decision where you have to change something about the way you look,” Batroukh told TechCrunch. “That’s the ethos of the entire company. Our plan is to build out this product ecosystem of invisible health tracking.”
Hiyd’s first device to make health tracking look cooler is a small, slim disc that attaches to the back of your watch via microsuction, a material technology that allows the sensor to sit flush under your watch without magnets or adhesive. That way, it won’t leave any residue or mess with the mechanics of watches that keep time using magnets.
“Microsuction is essentially a textured silicone, with hundreds of tiny pockets per square inch molded into a pliable sheet. So when you press on it, it pushes air out of all those pockets, and you end up with a vacuum — just like traditional suction cups but scaled down incredibly,” Batroukh explained. “It works incredibly at stopping shear forces, but a little bit of prying allows it to pop right off, which is ideal for us. It’s also incredibly thin at just 0.3 mm with our manufacturing processes.”
According to Batroukh, the sensor, which measures 2.7 mm thick and weighs 7 grams, collects biometrics similar to those of leading wearables, including heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep staging, movement, calories burned, and VO2 max estimations, then syncs to an iOS or Android app. In order to fine-tune the sensor, Hiyd’s team is filming themselves doing various activities, then labeling those datasets to train its AI.
“We go for a walk and say, ‘This is somebody walking, this is somebody jogging, this is somebody running,’” he said. “The one thing that AI is really good at is data analysis, so we can basically fit a lot of heuristic analysis into our sets really quickly.”
On its app, Hiyd is also working to incorporate nutrition tracking. The goal isn’t to count calories, but rather to help users glean insights about how their eating habits impact their sleep quality or workout performance.
“What we will do is say like, ‘Hey, on days where you work out at 10 p.m. instead of 10 a.m., your sleep quality is actually worse,’ and that’ll be specific to you,” he said. “Or it’ll say, ‘Hey, we think you had a less deep sleep last night because you had a slice of cake before you went to bed, and the sugar affected it.’”
Batroukh spent about seven years as a manufacturing design engineer at Apple, a company synonymous with iconic hardware. But he wanted to know if he could design something great without the support of a global brand and a multitrillion-dollar market cap.
“One of the reasons I left Apple was a lot of the products became a little bit more about being an Apple product, rather than being something for the customer,” he said. “[Hiyd] gives me the opportunity to do the exact opposite.”
Batroukh is joined by fellow founders Omar Shakir, an experienced mechanical engineer who is the startup’s CTO, and Mahamad Charawi, who is its head of software. (Charawi previously co-led the Y Combinator-backed startup Laudspeaker through its sale.)
Hiyd is bringing its tiny sensor to the big stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, where the company is competing as one of the top 20 companies at Startup Battlefield on Wednesday. (Don’t miss out on the action.) In November, the company plans to launch a Kickstarter. So far, over 16,000 people have made deposits to secure Hiyd’s first units.