A Chennai-headquartered startup, Sociodent, is trying to address unmet clinical needs related to oral care of dependent individuals.
The startup is trying to address the dependent individual market with a special focus on geriatric and locomotor disability subsegment. The target market includes anyone with loss of dexterity in their upper limbs, those with limited fine motor skills and others with temporary or permanent loss of functioning of the upper limbs.
“Our target audience are those who cannot brush. It can be someone who is bed-ridden or has some other physical problems where they can’t brush,” Steward Gracian, Founder and CEO of Sociodent, said. “These individuals have a high degree of dependency on caregivers for this simple daily task of oral hygiene / brushing, and this affects their quality of life by adding to their pre-existing psychological pain of dependency,” he said.
Gracian explained that it is a mouthpiece (like an automated brush) and works with battery as well as power supply. “Our product is focused on offering gradual independence in the periodic basic task of oral hygiene, aspires to reduce complications from poor oral care and improve the quality of life of dependent individuals,” he said. The firm is currently entering the clinical validation phase of testing on actual users.
The founders of the startup, Steward Gracian S. and Stephen Samuel J., are experienced dentists from Chennai, and started working on Assistive Oral Care Device as a novel patent pending mouthpiece-based oral hygiene solution for addressing the problem of poor oral care and oral hygiene of dependent individuals. Eventually, they created this company, realising the commercialisation potential of this product in the Assistive Technology space.
The startup was incorporated in March 2021 and, since then, has been part of the IIT-M Research Park ecosystem. “We are incubated at IITM HTIC Medtech Incubator from March 2021 until now,” Mr. Gracian said. “We are currently funded by government grants and seed funding. So far, from the time of inception of the idea till the current stage, we have raised around ₹73.95 lakh,” Gracian said.
Published - December 11, 2022 10:46 pm IST
