Burgeoning startup combines textiles and technology
Their mission is in their name. Predictive Wear focuses on making connected clothing that monitors your health.
Dane Albaugh, the CEO, and Pablo Argote, the CTO, are Purdue graduates and are working together with six other graduates to make their mission a reality.
The team of eight met while studying biomedical engineering at Purdue. They melded their various expertise after cofounding a student organization and eventually started the company, Predictive Wear.
“We created a solution both as a service and product that can center around the patient and have an ecosystem focused on predictive analytics, health informatics and wearable technology,” Argote said. “We believe the future is going this direction, especially in medicine.”
While the big picture is all clothing, Predictive Wear has focused on compression leggings with textile sensors as their first product. They currently have prototypes they test on themselves and will be starting early clinical studies in January of next year.
The textile sensors would detect things like swelling, for example, in order to predict potential complications like blood clots.
“The current stockings they make are preventive but subjective because they can’t predict complications,” Argote said. “With our sensors, we’d be able to get a closer insight to what’s happening and monitor the progress of the treatment.”
Argote focuses on the hardware-side of the business and has been recently concentrated on the textile side.
“We look at clothes and say, yeah they’re just clothes,” Argote said. “But if you look at how they’re actually made, and the skills required to innovate in it, you realize how developed an industry it is.”
Albaugh focuses on the business and strategy of Predictive Wear. The team recently won the Southwest Indiana Pitch Competition in Dubios County.
“It’s good validation that we’re communicating well and we’re able to really get across what exactly our mission is,” Albaugh said.
Over the next year, their biggest focus is finishing the technological development and starting the FDA process to get the initial product on the market.
“It was definitely overwhelming at first, but it’s just been really rewarding over time to learn how these different things work together to get our product to market,” Albaugh added.
The team of eight are based out of West Lafeyette and Zionsville. Argote’s parents, who live in Zionsville, even offered up their basement as lab space. Albaugh and Argote are the managers while the six others are part-time as they finish their master’s or PhD.
“Right now, all the pieces are in place to succeed,” Argote said.
Getting to know Dane and Pablo…
Dane is an astro-photographer.
Pablo loves languages and can speak Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.