Jupl: Building technology with a social purpose

Sir Ray Avery is one of the founders of the software company that is making inroads in healthcare for the elderly.

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Jupl co-founders Alan Brannigan and Sir Ray Avery

“We want to focus on the customer first.”

Gui Feijo is well aware that baby boomers are looking for wearable technology to help manage their health.

They want a gadget solution to take outside the home and many of them may not want to wear a pendant, explains Feijo, general manager for Jupl in Australia.

But Jupl, he explains, “is more than than technology, it is technology with a purpose.”

“We want to focus on the customer first,” says Feijo, who had worked at VitalCall and St John in Australia, prior to Jupl.

“We want people to be wearing devices in a nonintrusive way, that keeps their dignity, and allows them to get a good level of care from their family or care provider.

“They must not feel they have a 'big brother' or have someone watching them all the time, but they can get help when they need it,” he says.

“We needed wearables that are smart enough as a standalone device,” says Feijo. “It is a mobile phone on your wrist. It does not depend on a mobile phone to call.”

Jupl is a Kiwi company, co-founded by Sir Ray Avery and Allan Brannigan, that provides technology to connect people wearing medical devices, carers and healthcare professionals to assist in daily care management.

The company’s cloud-based platform, the Virtual Biometric Network, coordinates hardware and software to create a unique and interactive experience, which gives everyone access to key features and tools.

That technology also connects the wearer with a call centre in emergencies, stores and sorts healthcare information, while sharing care updates through the Friends & Family smartphone app.

He says Sir Ray Avery is an innovator, who is keen on using technology to provide better outcomes for people’s health and to take healthcare of a new level.

But, as he explains, Jupl is a software company and it chose specifically not to be involved in hardware.

“Hardware is fast moving, we don't want to compete with the Samsungs of the world, with hundreds of millions of dollars for R and D."

Thus the company partnered with Cisco Jasper, to provide a wearable mobile Personal Emergency Response System (mPERS) that promotes safety and wellness.

We want people to be wearing devices in a nonintrusive way, that keeps their dignity, and allows them to get a good level of care from their family or care provider

Gui Feijo, Jupl

The wearable device leverages the Samsung Gear S3 smartwatch and purpose-built software from Jupl, to provide a personal emergency response device without the need for a smartphone.

These devices, which leverage the Cisco Jasper IoT platform to deliver connected health services, greatly increases independence for users while providing peace of mind for them and their friends and family.

The smartwatch devices with Jupl's connected health software utilise embedded SIM technology. This enables a smaller form factor packed with features such as GPS monitoring, activity tracking and telephonic capabilities – all without the presence of a smartphone.

Each of these services is managed via the Cisco Jasper Control Center IoT platform.

Apart from the user’s peace of mind knowing they can automatically notify emergency services and their healthcare professionals where they are, the devices also monitors the user’s vital signs and provides critical alerts.

The Friends & Family service enables users to share their location and information with their carers, including friends, family, neighbours and others in their community.

Beyond the primary market of the elderly and those in aged care, Cisco Jasper and Jupl are targeting other groups that could benefit from this technology.

“There’s a capacity for this device to be used by a wide range of consumers as a personal safety device,” says Jupl co-founder Alan Brannigan.

Jupl CEO Alan Brannigan at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Tom Fisher, managing director of Cisco Jasper, ANZ, says Jupl was one of Cisco Spark’s first customers on the Control Centre platform.

“We’ve been working with them in the evolution of their home-based monitoring and mPERS solutions, for around three years now,” says Fisher.

He says Jupl uses the Control Centre for the initial setup and debugging of units, both in mass production and units deployed in the field.

The Control Centre is one of their first ports of call for rapidly identifying and resolving any connectivity issues, should they arise.

Jupl uses the Cisco Jasper Automation Engine component of the Control Centre platform to automatically monitor and manage their network cost, detect possible security breaches and to deploy devices on mobile networks with no manual intervention, states Fisher.

Brannigan, on the other hand, explains they use control Centre for a range of functions.

“We use both the web UI and the API,” he says. “The main views we use are the list of devices, spotlight (for detailed diagnostics capability) and the diagnostics wizard.”

“We are running a billing application at the end of the month that uses the API to go through our list of devices and optimise our available rate plans.

“We use the API to bring information from the Control Centre back into our cloud system (called VBN). We also write contextual device-related information to the Control Centre via the API.”

WitH IoT, Jupl gets better visibility of billing and real-time control of SIM states, and there is near real-time status of devices on the field.

Brannigan says the Control Centre was critical as the company expanded into Australia, and in other offshore markets.

“Moving to Australia has been easier because we are already familiar with the interface and company. Thus bringing up our system on Telstra and Optus will be easier as the API interface will not have to be re-written.

“Troubleshooting is far simpler. Because we are using Jasper across numerous telecoms providers we therefore do not have to use any new processes.

“Cisco Jasper are now brokering introductions with mobile service providers in new overseas markets for us, reducing the barriers to entry in key countries,” says Brannigan.

“Leveraging Cisco Jasper’s global footprint has been an enormous help for a company of Jupl’s size and reach,” he says.

“We found Samsung the best especially with Gear S3 to provide the hardware for our solution. We just lay over our software into the watch as an app.”

“We know when the device is online or offline, that is important in our industry,” says Feijo.

“We know if something is going on and allows us to talk to the family tell them there is an outage in the area, so please make sure your mum is taken care of.”

Customers can do a double press on the watch and make a phone call to an emergency centre. The family member or carer have access to the Jupl app which then shows all the events and location of the person, he says.