Sergio Marín and Juan Pablo Velásquez have built Netux, a company that uses the Internet of Things to monitor patients and medications, with their own capital. Their system could be helpful in tracking covid-19 vaccines.
By breaking into the healthcare sector with the Internet of Things (IoT), Netux is proving that having a hardware company in Colombia is possible.
"The devices are entirely designed by us and the manufacturing is done in Asia," Sergio Marin, the CEO and co-founder of Netux, a Medellin-based company that, in addition to equipment, has also deployed cloud-based software that it offers as a service, told Forbes. "It consists of doing remote monitoring of patients and health schemes to reduce costs."
The system for the health sector that he devised with his partner Juan Pablo Velásquez has more than 30,000 active units in cities such as Bogotá, Pereira, Barranquilla and Bucaramanga, monitoring physiological variables to track patients remotely and tracking the cold chain of medicines in real time.
This last variant works by placing sensors in the refrigerators to monitor temperatures and alert when there is a power outage. A refrigerator without power can lose up to $100 million worth of medicines.
As a result, they believe that their company could gain momentum in the monitoring of covid-19 vaccines. "We have been monitoring vaccine cold chains for more than a decade, now our sensors are in about 1,500 drug coolers," notes Marín, who was recently named by MIT Technology Review as one of Latin America's under-35 innovators.
Marín and Velásquez met in a biomedical engineering research group at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, from where they went on to create this healthtech, which in its origins was broader, addressing industrial, environmental and agricultural issues.
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