Chris Otto founded Halo Monitoring, formerly Halo Research, with his brother-in-law, Dr. Brent Wren, a marketing professor at UAH, and Dr. Chirag Patel, a former co-worker at Adtran and college classmate at UAH.

Otto, 33, and his team have developed a wearable device that lets caregivers remotely monitor key vital signs for elderly adults who want to keep some independence and that automatically detects potentially serious events, such as a fall, and alerts a caregiver.

About a year and a half ago, Otto, Wren and Patel put together the initial two-page draft of a business plan during the inaugural Alabama Launchpad business plan competition formed by six of the state’s research universities and the business community.

“It’s extremely exciting to see this system come to life and our plans come to fruition,” Otto said.

Business reporter Marian Accardi talked with Otto last week in his office at BizTech. The technology incubator sits across Sparkman Drive from Otto’s alma mater, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer engineering.

The conversation has been edited for space and clarity:

How did you come up with the idea for the system?

Really the idea came from two places. I had been working on a master’s thesis in collaboration with professors at the university and was working on a wearable body-area network for health monitoring. I had developed a fairly mature prototype.

As I was wrapping up my thesis, I was witnessing my mother (a nurse by profession) caring for my grandmother. My grandmother was living in her own home and enjoyed her independence, but depended on my mother to clean her home and remind her to take her medication.

I started looking for tools to help my mother and grandmother and realized there were really no good tools that took advantage of technology and the ubiquity of the Internet. A panic-button device only works when the person is conscious and can push a button. The second problem with the panic button is that it’s a one-way device, so there’s no peace of mind for the caregiver if the elderly person doesn’t or can’t answer a phone call…. Read More