SpeechVive, an Indianapolis, Indiana-based startup developing medical devices to improve speech clarity of Parkinson’s patients, raised $2.275m in seed funding.
The company was awarded a two-year $1.3m grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and received an additional $975k investment from BioCrossroads’ Indiana Seed Fund II, The Purdue Foundry and a private investor.
The funds will be used to design, build and test a telehealth platform that enables speech pathologists to program the SpeechVive device from a remote location anywhere in the world. The telehealth platform will allow SpeechVive to reach elderly or physically impaired patients who cannot travel to speech pathologists.
SpeechVive is based on the research of Jessica Huber, Ph.D. at the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, focused on developing medical devices to improve speech clarity of Parkinson’s patients.
The SpeechVive device, which fits like a hearing aid in the patient’s ear, detects when a patient is speaking and elicits louder and clearer speech through an involuntary reflex known as the Lombard Effect.
FinSMEs
18/05/2016