iOS Developer Showcase: Airveda, Remidio and Gameberry

Closer to home, Apple’s thriving app developer community in India has grown by leaps and bounds. Ahead of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, we met up with developers and founders based out of India, some with a new take on ideas as old as time and others applying the hardware and strong iOS capabilities to solve pressing problems of today.

Airveda is a health-tech company that helps people monitor and reduce exposure to air pollution via their consumer IoT-powered devices, both personal and across the Airveda network, and an intuitive mobile app that delivers real-time data on PM2.5, PM10, CO₂, temperature and humidity. Namita Gupta is the founder of Airveda 

 How did Airveda come about to be? 

After returning from the US, where I had worked at Microsoft for seven years and then Facebook for six years, I came back to India in December 2013. At the time, my three-year-old daughter was diagnosed with severe childhood asthma, and it was around this time that Delhi was declared the most polluted city in the world. That’s how I got involved in the air pollution conversation primarily as a mother and as an air quality advocate. And there was little equality data available, to decide when to send her outside to play, or when to ask her to wear a mask.

I partnered with Prashant, my brother, who's into hardware manufacturing. And, we decided, let's try to build out this app and these devices. We put these devices together, and we had a lot of parents reaching out, so we put these devices on Amazon, and they started selling out because there was a real need. Without data, it's so hard to understand what's going on - data gives you a sense of control, right?

Like my daughter's school - even though initially they were pushing back so much, they refused to accept there was an air quality problem since there were so many trees around. Once I handed them an air quality monitor, they started noting down numbers in different parts of the school, at different times of the day…and started making changes. What I realized early on in my journey is that data can really, really make a difference.

Tell us about the Airveda app

One of the first things we did was to build an air quality app and you know, today, has over sort of 9,000 stations - government as well as private stations – and we show real-time data and actionable insight. So it tells you when you should go outside and play or, you know, when you should wear a mask outdoors, we show daily trends, for example, 12 to 4 p.m. is usually the best time of the day, so this is a good time to plan outdoor play time for children. We show monthly and seasonal trends so you can plan your vacation around that. We also do forecasts of air quality so that you can sort of understand what's happening in the next few days and also compare against previous years.

And one of the most loved features of our app is actually our air quality widgets, which show you the air quality right on your phone screen without having to go into the app and they show real-time air quality data from your nearest equality monitor. 

The colors indicate what the air quality is, from green, yellow to red, and then we also have a mascot, Ira, who progressively gets happier or sicker based on air quality and you also see the environment around her, the flowers start to wilt as the air quality deteriorates. We have our air quality maps where we show data from the different air quality sensors that are set up around the country, and a leaderboard where you can see how your city is ranking across other cities in India as well as around the world. And we’ve been working with the Apple Developer team on feedback on the app, making the UI intuitive and more accessible. 

How do your air quality monitors interplay with your app?

When I came back to India, I bought air purifiers, but then I didn't know if they were actually working, and unfortunately, at the time, there was no access to air quality monitors that you could use to measure air quality at home. Similarly, at my daughter’s school…

So, we decided to actually build air quality monitors that we could use at home to understand when the purifiers are working. Likewise, one for my daughter's school so they could actually try and start tracking air quality data and start making decisions about students’ exposure based on the data. 

But broadly, less than 100 out of 4,000 cities and towns in India had any kind of real-time air quality monitoring, even today it’s less than 300 cities with any kind of data, and this is because regulatory grade sensors are extremely expensive to deploy. So, another thing we wanted to do was build low cost sensors, which could be deployed in the cities to make more data available to citizens, especially in areas where there was no data. So today, we are fully manufacturing air quality sensors across indoor, as well as outdoor, as well as air conditioning duct monitors , which can be used in homes, which can be used in cities to monitor air quality in a real time basis.

We even have a program called Air Quality Champions, where we let individuals who care about air quality, set up air quality stations in their neighborhoods and make that available data available to other citizens in their neighborhoods. These sensors are available on Flipkart, Amazon and more recently Blinkit as well. 

Headquartered in Bangalore, Remidio AI-enabled medical devices company that has pioneered innovations that deliver specialist care to primary care and to patient homes, starting with the category of Ophthalmic Care. Combining Remidio’s diagnostic system with AI and smartphone-based retinal imaging, the solution brings world-class diagnostics to the grassroots level easily, efficiently and affordably. With the ability to screen for diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in under 10 seconds, Remidio’s system has garnered a reach of 15 million+ patients screened across 40+ countries with nearly 4,000 devices deployed in hospitals, clinics, and community programs, in India, as well as the US. Founded by Anand Sivaraman

Tell us about the journey so far, and the problem you’re trying to solve.

Remedio is focused on ask the question - how do you re-imagine healthcare by being able to look at both eye diseases as well as systemic diseases from the eye by using technology that involves the Apple iPhone, Apple's CoreML platform, as well as patented optics that we have in front of these devices. It started in a chance meeting on a train journey when a renowned ophthalmologist asked Anand - why are ophthalmologists spending 80% of their time finding out who has a problem, when their time should be spent on treating those who have a problem? How can non-invasive tests be done by someone who’s not an optometrist? And that's really how the journey started.

So, one of the key questions we asked ourselves is, how do you look at constraints forced in India as an opportunity to innovate? In doing that, we have quite a number of products in the eyecare space that are now brought to market. We’ve seen simplicity as a universal currency, in that of the sixteen million, a fair share of close to around four to five million impacted in the US as well, because the same devices that are built and designed for the last mile in India are also used in the convenience of our patients’ home in the US.

So, how do these devices work, and how are they different from the existing optometrist’ setup? 

So, just to give you a little bit of a sense on how we've been able to do this, if you were to take a consumer phones, for example, the way they've evolved from the rotary phones of many years back, would you really see is the fact that there has been a significant, destructive evolution. But if you look at medical devices, I'm sure if you go to an ophthalmologist’s or an orthometric clinic today, you'll still find these big devices that they use, which are feature rich but are not simple enough to use, because of which you're not going to be able to bring this outside the clinic.

So what we did was to take patented optics that we have now built and designed, combine that with the smartphone, and also use the CoreML platform of Apple to have AI algorithms that are working on the edge in a privacy-preserving manner. And today, within five to seven seconds, we can take an image of the back of the eye and actually give you a report on whether you may have chronic retinal diseases like diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, or macular degeneration. Today, if you visit a clinic, the first thing the doctor would do is shine some light into your eye, right? What we do is similar, shining light into the eye, shaping the light onto the retina for the app to take an image. What the Apple iPhone platform is enabling us to do is to be able to take the picture using the smartphone, run algorithms on the core core ML platform, and immediately give a report.

Whether it is for a healthcare worker in India at a public health center or convenience of a patient's home in the US. For example, LensCart in India uses the portable autorefractor meter to actually test for prescription at home and be able to then provide prescription eyeglasses. All this without putting any drops to dilate the patient, and the AI automatically triggers a capture, in fact, health workers don't even need to trigger a button to capture an image of the retina. Once the image is taken, the AI automatically runs algorithms and assesses the outcome, all without the images having to be sent to the cloud, without the need for the internet, with all the algorithms actually running on that smartphone on the edge, on the Apple CoreML framework. All while having the same clinical efficacy and standard of care as you would have with a traditional clinic setup, covering 95 to 95% of the scenarios, at a fraction of the cost - at an opthalmologist clinic, the investment is roughly around 50 to 55 lakhs, whereas the Remidio setup is roughly around 9 to 10 lakhs. 

And now what's been very promising with the research that we've done is actually extending this to systemic diseases like cardiovascular risk as well. Why the interest in these diseases? You have at least hundred to a hundred-twenty-five million patients with diabetes in a place like India and 600 million globally. But the problem today is the healthcare system is grouped and where to get a cardiovascular risk assessment or a chronic kidney disease or an eyecare screening, you need different sets of devices. We ask – can a single device do all of this, and can it do so non-invasively without the need for radiation and without the need for someone to prick and collect blood? That's really what we are focused on right now…. 

Besides leveraging the platform, how do you work with the Apple team to improve the app?

Well, in three different ways – the first is on the experience side, we need this to be more like a consumer device as opposed to being a medical device - so how do you do the app layout in a manner that it's very easy to use for someone who's never used a medical device before? Second, we need help to make sure that when we sell in the US, that the device is compliant in terms of security releases etc. And lastly, since this is an FDA approved device, we work very closely with Apple when the phones change. Though, more and more, we want the software to take on more of the load than the hardware and it's a very interesting phase where we are starting to see the role of AI and software, reducing the burden on hardware.

Gameberry offers the classic board game Ludo Star & a similar Spanish game, Parchisi Star, reimagining classic games on mobile with a social experience that helped friends and family connect, even if they were kilometers apart from each other. The games have been a runway hit with 25 million monthly active users and half a million concurrent players. Co-founded by Afsar Ahmad

Why Ludo? This is not the first Ludo game on the App Store. How is your Ludo a better version of whatever you had seen so far?

 So, we are a gaming company based out of Bangalore, bootstrapped and profitable. We started with the vision that we wanted to build a Ludo game for India, but the distribution of Apple has helped us grow across the world, till the point where it actually became a bigger market for us - interestingly, 99% of our active users are actually outside India. After building a few products, we eventually landed on Ludo in 2017, because of Jio, there was a huge demand for playing Ludo live in India. The demand from across the world led to us creating another Ludo game, which is Parchisi. The difference between these two games is that Ludo is played by countries which were ruled by Britishers and Parchisi is a game that was played by countries ruled by the Spanish. Similar demand, slightly different products with slightly different rule sets.

 In the first year itself, Ludo started getting a million downloads plus on iOS itself, which was all outside India, and Parchisi started getting half a million iOS downloads, which was again outside India. Back in 2017, there was no Ludo game which was giving four player experiences or team versus team experiences.

Of course, everything that you imagined (on Ludo) in your childhood and the way you had played it, was present in our version, but the interesting element from our side was the social experience. So, if you’re online and friends with me on Facebook, I would see a notification indicating you are online. As time has passed, we have incorporated more things – questions people can compete, interesting dices, frames, boards and avatars that people can buy and collect, 

What were the insights you saw from the social gaming aspects?

When I played Ludo in my childhood, it was with friends and family. So, I naturally wanted to play with different groups, maybe even people spread across the globe, right? Those things were missing from Ludo (before we created the game), plus the banter was missing, when you cut a token and then tease the other person. The social and emotional aspects were missing in the other games, which we brought in. 

 We have an interesting story in the two-versus-two feature we brought in – when we launched it, we were not entirely sure whether people were up to it or not. But it had a very specific use case - people who were in a relationship, they wanted to play together as a team versus other people who were also in a relationship.

You mentioned you were bootstrapped and profitable, what sort of monetisation are you doing on the app? 

So, 80% of our revenue comes from in-app purchases, dominated by iOS, and the ability that people buy the most is an ability to re-roll in their game. Essentially, it’s the ability to re-roll my dice if I don’t like the number, which is allowed in a limited quantity for the player because you don't want to interfere entirely with the luck element of the game. This is the major monetization lever for us - people want to have control of their destiny, they want to tweak it a little bit whenever they feel there's an urgent need for it .

How do you collaborate with Apple on making the app better? 

First, we do a lot of benchmarking exercises working with an Apple business manager, when they go back and check what is happening in the market, benchmark with the peer set and understand where there might be a gap, in terms of monthly bookings, how much conversion you can get in the App Store. The other thing is cultural understanding – being in Bangalore, we might not have complete cultural context of the MENA region, or let's say the Spanish population. A lot of discussions with the Apple teams across these regions helps our understanding - what is the thought process of players from there and what is missing in the game right now, what do we need to tweak in terms of marketing creatives. 

Tushar Kanwar is a tech columnist and commentator, and tweets @2shar.