(TM)
EmPowering a data-driven approach to personalized healthcare for people who don't (usually) use technology
Team
EmPowerYu was founded by mature, experienced professionals who have solid credentials in the health, home care, and technology fields. We have all been family caregivers.
Our goal is to give the benefits of digital healthcare to everyone.
Laura McIntosh, PhD
CEO
Dr. McIntosh has over 20 years’ experience in health R&D and consulting. Before founding EmPowerYu she was a Managing Scientist at Exponent, a leading scientific and engineering consulting company. At Exponent, she worked with and built interdisciplinary teams for medical device clients, health effects research, and product and chemicals testing. She wrote the grant and managed a multi-year Parkinson's Disease toxicology study for the British government that involved teams in the UK and US. Dr. McIntosh has experience in two prior startups, as well as her own consulting company, SafetyTox, LLC. She has a PhD in Environmental Neurotoxicology from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and did her thesis work in the Medical School Alzheimer's Disease research lab. She moved to Stanford for postdoctoral work in a neurochemistry laboratory, designing oxidation assays to characterize the effect of stress hormones on neurons. At Stanford she participated in Business School /Biology Department Entrepreneurship teams.
After taking care of her mother during her mother's final months, Laura started EmPowerYu to address the need for remote caregivers to have independent data from the home of medically vulnerable people. Her goal is to make the home smart enough to take care of us as we get older.
Lee Marshall
CTO
Mr Marshall has extensive experience with data systems, and thinks that designing data architecture is fun. From his early career in the gaming industry, to social matching services, to financial software, to seven and a half years as a Sr Software Engineer at Google, Lee has produced and maintained software and content for customer-facing applications. As he progressed, system architecture became his focus to ensure efficient and reliable data handling. Lee’s experience building Google Wallet’s secure payment system will translate well to the need for system engineering that protects patient data privacy.
Lee has seen how lack of relevant data in the healthcare system has reduced treatment options for older members of his family. He feels it is time to bring the type of personalization techniques already in use in other software industries into improving the diagnosis and treatment of people in today’s changing healthcare landscape. We need data from the home to achieve the promise of Personalized Medicine.
Mary Griffin, RN, MPH
Advisor, Business Development
Mary has over 35 years of experience in nursing, senior care, and home health care. She has a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from San Jose State University and a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. A recognized leader in the senior care industry, she has held senior executive positions at several national home care companies, owned and operated a home health care agency with offices throughout California, and has written several articles on a wide variety of heath care topics. Mary is also an early teleheath entrepreneur, having co-founded CareMaestro, a company providing telephonic transitional care solutions to hospitals, ACOs and other medical providers to help reduce unwanted or unplanned hospital and emergency room readmissions.
In addition to her professional credentials, Mary shares a perspective with many families. She was the primary family caregiver for her 91-year-old mother who was afflicted with memory impairment and debilitating arthritis. Her combined personal and professional experiences provide great insight into understanding clients and families in need, and how best to serve them.
Sheila Cagney, MBA
Senior Product Manager
When Sheila left her financial advisor career at Edward Jones to care for her own aging parents in Ireland, she learned the many and varied issues of caring for loved ones in their own home. After that experience she put her planning, advisory and project management skills to use assisting other families facing similar challenges as CEO of East Cork Home Care Ltd.
Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin – There’s no fireside like your own
(An Old Irish Proverb)
She believes that EmPowerYu can bring some much needed 21st century technology to assisting older people maintain their independence and dignity at home.
Sheila's technology experience includes applications engineering, technical support, integration, quality assurance and project management in various software companies including TIBCO.
She holds an MBA from California State University, a BA in Theoretical Physics from Trinity College Dublin, and a certificate in Gerontology.
Cynthia Barnes, MBA
Operations, Finance
Ms Barnes is a small business owner with an MBA in Engineering Management and Finance. She has been a serial angel investor in the consumer hardware space. Her background is in Program Management and Software Engineering, including BIOS and firmware projects, and manufacturing equipment and robotics. Cin lived in Japan to help integrate security products into system integrator packages as an International Program Manager.
Cin also helped manage her mother and father’s healthcare and then hospice care at a distance, so she understands the concerns of long distance family members. With her experience supporting her father who lived alone in a rural area, she wants EmPowerYu on the market to better connect him to both his provider and his family. Her father wanted it for his circle of friends who call each other every day and worry if someone doesn’t pick up the phone.
Rich Sneiderman
Advisor, User Interface
Mr Sneiderman has had a rich career integrating human-centric user interfaces with security and data management. His career has taken him from key roles in numerous successful startups to principal engineering and leadership roles at corporations such as McAfee and Intel. His passion for ensuring that his work centers around the user led to an Intel award for a product developed during an internal Geekathon.
Rich’s experience ranges from technical work in system architecture for distributed systems, to writing leading edge software code for products used by millions, to evangelizing for User Experience design for the McAfee consumer division. He works to ensure adaptability and scalability of his products as shown by McAfee awarding him their quarterly Consumer Ace award in 2013.
Rich also has experience as a family caregiver for a long-distance parent, and understands the personal needs and choices made by both sides. He brings that empathy to EmPowerYu as we use technology to ensure that older adults who want to continue living in their own homes and communities have both privacy and connection with their families and healthcare providers.
Jeffrey Sieracki, PhD,
Advisor, Analytics and Data Architecture
Dr Sieracki is an “extremely applied mathematician” with over 25 years’ experience in scientific and commercial R&D for industry, the DOD, and academia, including 15 years’ experience in technical and strategic business development.
Jeff directs Reality Analytics, a technology development firm that has developed projects in medical devices, robotics, data-intensive computing, machine vision, and opportunistic sensing, as well as a broad range of other signal and image processing projects. He is experienced in sparse signal analytic methods and holds fundamental patents in that field, and has particular expertise in signature and anomaly detection within large and noisy datasets. He currently holds 28 patents for his work advancing signal data analytics.
Prior to Reality Analytics, Jeff was co-founder of StimSoft, a medical device startup focused on neural stimulation for pain management, at which he was Vice President for Software Design and Algorithm Research. StimSoft was acquired by Medtronic in 2003.
Dr Sieracki holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing from the University of Maryland, and a BS in Physics and MS in Applied Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University.
Advisors
Shyamali Singhal, MD, PhD
Surgical Oncologist and Director of the Cancer Center
El Camino Hospital
Anna Lau, MBA, CPA
Finance for Startups
Test User
Gautam Shah
Change Healthcare
VP Platform and Marketplace
Walt Maclay
Voler Systems
Medical Device Hardware and Software
2 Patents Awarded in 2019!
System and method for adaptive indirect monitoring of subject
for well-being in unattended setting
US 10,311,694 B2, US 10,475,141 B2
We describe a system for passive event-based monitoring that adjusts to the individual, rather than expecting everyone to be the same.