Xandar Kardian Introduces Somily, Bringing Radar From the Hospital to the Bedroom Wall to Read the Chest, Not the Pulse at the Wrist, While You Sleep

Where a watch or ring reads the pulse through light at the skin, Somily measures the chest as it rises, falls and moves with every breath and heartbeat, revealing whether breathing is deep, shallow, uneven or rapid, and how clearly and regularly the heartbeat comes through.

With no wearable, camera, microphone or anything to charge, Somily extends years of contactless clinical monitoring into everyday health

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Xandar Kardian, the radar health technology company whose FDA-cleared sensors monitor vital signs without physical contact, announced Kardian Somily, its first consumer product. Mounted on the wall above the bed, Somily uses radar, the same sensing that lets an aircraft or a self-parking car judge how far away something is and how it is moving, to read the chest through the air and through bedding while a person sleeps. It measures how far the chest rises and falls with each breath and moves with each pump of the heart, and how that movement changes across the night, without asking the person to wear, charge or remember anything.

Somily is built on the same radar as Xandar Kardian's XK300, the FDA-cleared medical device that has monitored more than 49,000 people in hospitals, skilled-nursing facilities and other care settings for over five years. The XK300 is cleared in the U.S. and five other countries and grew out of research documented in 37 journal publications. While the consumer health industry spent the last five years teaching people to read more from the pulse at the wrist, Xandar Kardian spent those same years in hospitals and nursing homes learning to read the body from the chest, with nothing on the patient at all. Somily brings that measurement to the bedroom wall, for anyone.

The sensor sends a tiny radar pulse 15 million times a second and measures the returning signal as the chest moves through space, which is how it can tell deep breathing from shallow, even breathing from uneven and slow breathing from rapid. Two nights can both average 16 breaths a minute, while one was even from start to finish and the other was shallow and fast, uneven, and then settled into slow, deep breaths. After the second night, a person wakes up feeling off without knowing why, while familiar metrics may look unchanged. Somily provides a different view by showing how breathing patterns changed across the night. In the company’s clinical work, that overnight record became part of a care team's monitoring record. Somily produces it in a person's own bedroom. That variation in how a person breathes, respiratory rate variability (RRV), is the breathing equivalent of the heart rate variability (HRV) millions of people check every morning.

Heartbeat Clarity does the same for the heart. Every beat moves the chest wall by a fraction of a millimeter, and because Somily is measuring distance rather than reading a pulse downstream at the wrist, it captures how far the chest moved with each beat and how evenly the beats were spaced. That is how it shows how clearly and regularly the heartbeat came through across the night, compared with that person's usual nights. Radar reads movement and nothing else, so there is no camera and no microphone, and because it sees the whole body move, it knows when a person is awake, talking or turning over and keeps those minutes out of the resting numbers. Each morning, the XKare app compares the night with the person's own recent nights and shows what changed, whether it was the breathing, the heartbeat or sleep, and by how much. The app brings those signals together in a nightly view, showing RRV as even and regular, Heartbeat Clarity as steady, and an overall recovery summary based on the night’s breathing, heartbeat, sleep and routine.

On a morning when a person feels off and familiar metrics look unchanged, Somily can show that the breathing turned shallow after 2 a.m., or that the heartbeat came through less clearly than usual, giving the person something specific to track. Those are the changes a care team used to read on a monitoring screen. Now they are on the person's own phone.

"Everyone I meet knows their HRV. Almost nobody has heard of RRV, and breathing is the vital sign clinicians watch first," said Sam Yang, CEO and co-founder of Xandar Kardian. "People already understand the physical part. You know the difference between shallow breathing and a deep breath, and you know when your heart is pounding. Those are events at the chest. Radar sees the chest move, and once you can measure that while someone sleeps, you are looking at the body instead of a number."

Somily is also ideal for people who will not or cannot wear a tracker, seniors, anyone with limited mobility, and anyone who does not want one more device to remember and charge, because nothing has to be put on.

"Cardiologists learn what the heart is doing from the chest, not the wrist," said Dr. Clifton Watt, MD, FACC, cardiologist at UCSF. "Seeing how clearly and how regularly the heartbeat came through across a night, without a lead on the patient and without anyone in the room, is information that has lived on clinical monitoring screens. Having it night after night from someone's own bedroom is a different kind of record."

"Consumer health has become very good at giving people more numbers," Yang said. "The next step is showing people what produced them. Breathing is more than breaths per minute and a heartbeat is more than beats per minute. For five years we have measured heart rate and breathing this way in hospitals and nursing homes. Now we are bringing it into the bedroom without asking anyone to become a patient first. We think this is where health monitoring ends up, not on the body but in the room around it."

Orders are open now at kardian.com. Somily is $299, including two years of Kardian Max membership with no monthly fee, and is HSA- and FSA-eligible for qualified U.S. customers. Couples can use two sensors, one above each side of the bed. All data is stored on U.S. servers.

About Xandar Kardian

Xandar Kardian turned radar from a way to sense the world around us into a vital-sign sensor for the human body, proved it across hospitals, senior care and other care settings without contact, and is now bringing that capability into the home. Its XK300 is an FDA 510(k)-cleared Class II medical device for measuring heart rate and respiratory rate, prescribed through care providers. Kardian Somily is a separate general wellness product built on the same radar for use in the home. The company has offices in New York, Toronto and Seoul.

Heartbeat Clarity reports what the sensor measures, the way a sleep score does. It is not an FDA-cleared measurement and is intended for wellness tracking rather than diagnosis. Kardian Somily is a general wellness product, not a medical device, and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. The XK300 does not diagnose any condition and is not an alarm for acute or life-threatening situations.