NIH SBIR funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute advances the secure data platform behind a wearable designed to ease the burden of manual vital-signs checks and to support better-informed care whether in the hospital or at home.

MINNEAPOLIS, Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Senphonix, Inc., a medical technology startup developing SleeveSense™, a wearable designed to monitor patients’ vital signs continuously over days, weeks, or months at a time, today announced a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), through its National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The award marks a major milestone for Senphonix: its second federal research grant in a matter of weeks, following a National Science Foundation (NSF) STTR Phase I award announced in September.

The NIH grant will fund testing of the platform’s software stack in a clinical environment, cloud and database scaling, and cybersecurity work toward SOC 2 Type II readiness. Taken together, it advances a platform built to address one of healthcare’s most persistent and costly problems: the manual, intermittent way patient vital signs are captured.

The two recent grants add to a fast-growing base of non-dilutive funding and partnership behind SleeveSense, spanning the NSF, the NIH, Microsoft, the Arizona Commerce Authority through the WearTech Applied Research Center, and the University of Arizona, reflecting growing momentum behind the problem it sets out to solve.

The need is significant and well documented. Nurses can spend up to and sometimes in excess of 20 percent of every shift taking and documenting vital signs manually, time drawn away from patient care. Because those readings are episodic, changes in a patient’s condition can go unseen between checks. After discharge, many patients are not monitored at all, creating a gap associated with costly, avoidable readmissions. Automated, always-on monitoring is intended to speak to each of these at once: reducing manual workload, supporting earlier awareness of a patient’s changing condition, and helping health systems pursue fewer readmissions and new remote-patient-monitoring revenue.

SleeveSense is a comfortable sleeve designed to be worn on the upper arm without interruption long-term, in and out of the hospital, and to deliver clinical-grade measurements, an accuracy target the company plans to validate in its upcoming clinical testing. It charges wirelessly, with no need to remove or handle the device. The commercial model is built to remove upfront financial risk for the hospital: Senphonix provides and manages all the infrastructure and only bills once a sleeve is assigned to a patient, so there is no capital outlay and nothing to pay for unused capacity.

“The barrier has never really been the sensor; it’s been building something hospitals can actually put to work and doing it with no upfront cost for them to try,” said Mike Haldane, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Senphonix and principal investigator on the NIH award. “We designed SleeveSense to reduce manual workload and fit the way care teams already operate, with a light footprint and the clinical-grade accuracy we are validating in testing. NIH’s support helps us get the software clinically ready as we work toward bringing SleeveSense to market following FDA clearance.”

By design, the data is available to clinicians within the electronic health record, both during the hospital stay and after the patient goes home. Once discharged, patients can also view their own vitals through a simple mobile app that runs on its own with no action required. The work builds on the company’s NSF STTR Phase I award which funds development of the wearable’s wireless hardware and the software platform itself, so the two federal grants together move the device and its software from prototype toward clinical readiness.

Interest from the field is strong. In national studies sponsored by Senphonix, 98 percent of nurses (n=402) and 94 percent of healthcare CFOs (n=457) indicated they would support adopting SleeveSense within their organizations. Confidence level and margin of error for both studies were 95% and +/- 5% respectively.

“Two federal research awards in a matter of weeks, on top of private and state support, and clear demand from the nurses and CFOs who would use and buy it, tells us the market sees what we see,” said John Grant, PhD, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Senphonix. “That combination of non-dilutive capital and real demand lets us move efficiently toward commercialization and the partnerships that will bring SleeveSense to health systems.”

Studies have shown that measurable changes in vital signs often precede serious adverse events, sometimes by hours. By monitoring without interruption in the hospital and at home, SleeveSense is designed to make those early changes easier to see and to give clinicians a fuller picture across the care continuum.

“For years, I watched companies try to make continuous wearable monitoring work in the real world, and every one of them ran into the same practical barriers that keep it out of hospitals,” said Mark Koppel, MD, a founding member of the Senphonix advisor team. “What convinced me about SleeveSense is that this team went after those friction points head-on, setting out to design around every one of them. That is what has been missing.”

Senphonix expects to begin a clinical study of SleeveSense in late 2026 or early 2027 and intends to pursue U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 510(k) clearance in early to mid-2027, following clinical testing. The NIH award follows the company’s implementation of its quality management system, establishment of manufacturing partnerships, and review of its clinical testing protocol with the FDA.

About Senphonix

Senphonix is a medical-technology company developing SleeveSense, a platform designed for continuous, comfortable, long-term vital-signs monitoring. It is being built to move with the patient across inpatient, outpatient, and at-home care, to fit hospital operations with a light footprint, and to be priced on a per-patient basis with the infrastructure managed by Senphonix. The company is a C-Corp based in Delaware, with offices in Arizona and Minnesota, and its core technology is exclusively licensed from the University of Arizona. Learn more at www.senphonix.com.

About the NIH SBIR Program

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program at the U.S. National Institutes of Health provides non-dilutive funding to U.S. small businesses to develop and commercialize innovative biomedical technologies that improve health and save lives.

Research reported in this press release is supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43HL184398. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

SleeveSense is a device in development. It is not currently cleared or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is not available for sale. Statements in this release regarding the device’s intended design, performance, and benefits describe development goals and have not been established. This release contains forward-looking statements about product development, regulatory plans, and future performance that involve risks and uncertainties; actual results may differ.

Market research was administered by MarketWise Advising, LLC, via national surveys conducted in 2025 and 2026 for Senphonix. Disclosure: Mike Haldane is both Founder/President of MarketWise Advising and Co-Founder/Co-CEO of Senphonix.

Media Contact

Michelle Gjerde, PR Specialist
Senphonix
michelleg@senphonix.com | 605-303-1934

Product photos are available upon request.

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SOURCE Senphonix, Inc.