Sonny Vu Makes Wearable Health Sensors Painless

Sonny Vu has founded a company that aims to make wearable health sensors so unobtrusive that they will become a part of everyone’s lives without the need for daily conscious decision to use them.

Vu launched Misfit Wearables last fall with former Apple CEO John Sculley with seed money from Cambridge tech incubator IncTank Ventures, then raised another $7.6 million from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and leading tech venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.

It is currently developing a product that is tiny enough to be integrated into clothing but powerful enough to provide a key health reading in addition to heart rate and calorie burn rate. Most importantly, Vu promises that the data his sensors generate will be interpreted into practically useful information via software that will reside in your phone.

“You can’t just lie to your doctor—it’s all there, recorded,” Vu promises. “You cut right to the chase rather than having to tease out all that information.”

Vu, 39, is a veteran in the field of mobile health sensors. He is a co-founder of AgaMatrix which developed the first FDA-approved glucose sensor that plugs into an iPhone. It goes on sale in Apple stores this month under the brand name iBGStar.

Vu sees Misfit as carrying the concept of health monitors to the ultimate step of taking out the “intentionality” — the daily decision to use a health technology.

“The best products are the ones that you really rely on but you don’t have to remember to use,” he says. That’s why he has been studying the world of fashion as a field more closely allied to Misfit Wearables than even technology — no one has to tell you to dress yourself every day.

As an ancillary benefit Vu sees the goal of his products as obsoleting annual visits to the doctor for health checkups. Misfit’s software will seek to apply medical insights to the data picked up by the sensors to provide diagnoses at the level of seasoned healthcare professionals.

Vu is a Vietnamese American who has built a software development team in his ancestral homeland. He sees himself as a product guy who loves to tinker with product designs.

Prior to starting AgaMatrix with his college roommate, Vu had worked at Microsoft and postponed his PhD work at MIT to start FireSpout, a natural language software company whose technology was purchased by a large search engine.