Seattle startup Dopl Technologies has developed a telerobotic ultrasound system intended to bring specialist care to patients in rural areas.
Dopl’s mission is to eliminate the long distances that some rural patients must travel in order to be diagnosed and treated by specialists concentrated in urban areas.
The company covered some distance of its own last month when it was named the winner of the 2024 Flywheel Investment Conference in Wenatchee, Wash., and was awarded $150,000 from the Flywheel Angel Network.
The robotic arm of a Dopl ultrasound system, located in a rural hospital, for instance, can be controlled via the hand movements of a remote sonographer in a different location. The video below demonstrates the distance and device as Dopl co-founder and CEO Ryan James receives an ultrasound on his chest while he’s on Whidbey Island, Wash., via a device controlled by co-founder and COO Steve Seslar, 55 miles away in Bellevue, Wash.
Dopl, founded almost two years ago, says its technology will bring increased patient access to care, improved patient outcomes, and increased revenue and decreased costs for hospitals.
James previously spent four years as a software engineer at Microsoft, before co-founding Pear Medical, a University of Washington startup that used augmented and virtual reality to compile medical scans into an interactive 3D model. James has a PhD from UW in biomedical and health informatics.
Seslar is a Georgetown and Harvard-trained cardiologist with 18 years of clinical practice experience who has taught at the UW of more than 10 years. Dopl’s third co-founder is chief medical officer Wayne Monsky, an interventional radiologist with 20 years experience who is also Georgetown and Harvard trained, and teaches at UW Medical Center.
Dopl’s customers are hospitals that install its system to provide ultrasound exams to patients in their community. James said the startup is generating revenue, but right now is focused on understanding customers, not growth.
“We currently send traveling ultrasound specialists to rural hospitals to perform in-person procedures using conventional equipment,” James said. “Once our telerobotic ultrasound system is FDA cleared next year, we will transition our customers from in-person exams to telerobotic exams.”
He added that the strategy is “analogous to Netflix shipping DVDs before they started streaming content.”
James posted this week on LinkedIn about a new partnership with T-Mobile which utilizes the carrier’s 5G network for Dopl’s telerobotic exams. In a T-Mobile blog post, he wrote that 5G has enabled Dopl to evolve its platform into a mobile solution that can bring healthcare anywhere, “including moving vehicles on land, at sea and in space.”
Dopl’s competitors include traditional ultrasound systems which usually sell in urban markets; AI assistants, which pair with non-specialists in performing ultrasound procedures; and other telerobotic systems, including FDA-cleared AdEchoTech, which James said is focused on international markets.
Dopl employs five people and has raised more than $800,000 to date. Current investors include Techstars, Seattle Angel Conference, Flywheel, Dream Variation Ventures and various angels.
