Monitoring a sick child’s temperature can be disruptive and unreliable. That’s what Lake Forest native William Duckworth is trying to solve with the Fever Smart patch thermometer, which links to smartphones to continuously track core body temperature. Duckworth, an engineering junior at the University of Pennsylvania, is CTO of iMobile Healthcare, which he co-founded with fellow Penn students Collin Hill (CMO) and siblings Aaron (CEO) and Becca Goldstein (COO, now graduated). They plan to soon launch the device with the help of more than $60,000 that they have raised, with about a week to go in their campaign, on crowdfunding site Indiegogo. Duckworth shares his biggest lesson as a student entrepreneur.
Q. What inspired this product?
A. During the summer of 2012 before our freshman year of college, Collin was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He became frustrated that there was no system on the market that allowed him to go to sleep and be alerted before he had a high fever and would have to rush to ICU to get treatment. He came up with the idea, and came to Aaron and I to talk through whether it was a possibility to make a product like that.
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Q. What is your role as CTO?
A. I lead the hardware and software development teams and I do a lot of the creative work, from graphics to the website. I’m working with the app development team through beta testing on the mobile app, and redesigning and developing the website ecommerce platform.
Q. How did Chicago factor into this process?
A. We all worked there this summer. I spent quite a bit of time at 1871 as a coworking space. I created prototypes and needed validation whether this was a marketable product. Aaron’s aunt and uncle live in Deerfield and helped test the product. The community of Deerfield moms is what swayed us (that) those moms and moms of children with certain conditions would want and buy it. We shot our crowdfunding video at Lake Forest Academy, where I went to high school. Our plan post-graduation is to move back to Chicago.
My mom, (Arzu Studio Hope founder and CEO) Connie Duckworth, was an advisor from the beginning. Greg Jones (partner at Edgewater Funds and former board chairman of NorthShore University HealthSystem) got me in the door at 1871 and has been an advisor connecting us with people in the Chicago medical space.
Q. What’s been the biggest challenge with Fever Smart?
A. It’s a Bluetooth 4.0 product compatible with smartphones. We’re in the process of developing a standalone hospital relay system with sensors where one nurse can monitor hundreds of patients from one device. How do we use this same technology and span very different uses?
Q. What’s your hardest lesson as an entrepreneur?
A. It’s that balance between school and work. As this grows, a lot more of our passion is with the company, but we still want to complete our degrees.
Q. Would you drop out?
A. It’s something we definitely think about on a daily basis. But we really think it’s important to finish school. Fever Smart is probably not the billion-dollar idea. We’re using it as a door into the larger mobile health care space and eventually move to be bigger players in the field.
Q. What’s next?
A. Delivering this first batch of units as quickly as possible. Our crowdfunding campaign is one to three months away from shipping. Next summer or fall we’ll be ready to introduce a blood glucose monitor that’s also mobile connected to provide a graphical continuous monitor and access to electronic medical records.
Q&As are edited for length and clarity.