Asha AI, an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, empowers older adults to age in place through a fully voice-enabled remote care solution. Users can chat with Asha, a conversational artificial intelligence-powered interface, to receive reminders on upcoming medical appointments and when to take medications, and to connect to care team or family members. Through Asha, patients can also order wellness services, such as meal planning, transportation to care services, and telehealth appointments. The app also allows caregivers and family members to manage medications, communicate with providers and pharmacies, and receive alerts and notifications on the health of their loved ones.
We sat down with founder and CEO Rashmi Joshi to chat about the company, its solution and the unique challenges of building a startup in the healthcare space.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What is Asha AI?
Asha AI is a fully voice-enabled conversational artificial intelligence (AI) caregiver. We’re primarily focused on older adults, people with disabilities and family caregivers. Our goal is to help connect care recipients with family members and caregivers who might not be physically present. We’ve also recently done a mini-pivot, moving into the pharmaceutical space and partnering with trial sites to help with clinical trial management.
People using Asha can get real-time health education through AI-based insights on how to stay compliant with their care, and to get answers to questions they might have throughout the day. Plus, if a user tells Asha that they are experiencing certain symptoms, we can share that with their care team or clinical trial management team, so they can intervene as necessary.
So it’s an app you can download to mobile devices?
Right, and it’s device agnostic so that people can use the hardware they’re already comfortable with. For example, we just recently launched on iOS. It’s fully enabled for Siri, so you don’t even have to open your phone or the Asha AI app to use it — you can just press the side button to have a conversation with Siri, and Siri will connect you to Asha on the backend. That makes it much simpler for people to use, especially those who aren’t super comfortable with technology.
What does the app do?
Our goal is to make it as seamless for the older person as having a conversation with a loved one, because that’s the gap we’re filling: Someone physically being there to ask them how they’re feeling, whether they have taken their meds or to see if they have any questions about their health. Caregivers and family members can also use the app to coordinate care, such as who is going to take them to a doctor visit.
Plus, it’s customizable for every individual. Asha can educate patients based on their level of health literacy, and even take into consideration their health chart and the medications they’re taking, so it can intelligently answer users’ questions based on their particular needs. In a clinical trial setting, it takes into account the trial protocol, the drugs and their side effects, and other information, which we can then cross-reference for insights into symptoms that users are reporting. Asha doesn’t make diagnostic decisions, but if we detect that some kind of escalation is required — for example, if a user reports debilitating headaches — we can route them to an appropriate member of their care team.
What was the catalyst for founding Asha AI?
I experienced firsthand how difficult it is to care for aging family members when you’re not physically with them. My grandparents, who lived on the other side of the world, were both dealing with multiple health conditions. Trying to figure out how to care for them was a nightmare for my family, because we all had jobs and responsibilities. We ended up taking turns flying from the US to India, and it was a very difficult experience. Most likely, at some point every one of us will end up taking care of a loved one, and it’s not always possible to be physically present with them. So I wanted to build a solution for both family caregivers and care recipients to solve that problem.
What are some challenges you’ve encountered along the way?
Asha doesn’t make clinical decisions, but we’re still subject to many of the compliance and data privacy protocols that other healthcare solutions are, and we have regulatory hoops to jump through, which is time consuming and costly. Plus, when you’re building a product to help people manage their health, there’s a seriousness to it — you really have to take your time to understand how to build your product in a way that will support your patients, because if you get it wrong, you’re messing with peoples’ lives.
Not all investors understand that building in the healthcare space is different than building a traditional tech company, and early stage venture funding has not been doing well for the past few years. Nevertheless, we’ve decided that we want to work with investors who understand what healthcare is all about and have a long-term vision that aligns with ours for building something that is sustainable.
What are the next steps for Asha AI?
We’ve largely been focused on doing our due diligence and building relationships, and now we’re excited to shift into the growth phase of the company, working with pharmaceutical companies on clinical trials, getting more insights, and leveraging those findings to build better solutions that can help address the health of our users.
To learn more about Asha AI, check out their website.
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