GOQii adds doctors, health services to new fitness band

US-based GOQii is integrating doctors and health services to its new fitness band as it looks to capture the numero uno position in the wearables market in India.
The company, which is backed by angel investors like Shriram Nene and his wife and Bollywood actress Madhuri Dixit Nene and Neeraj Arora (WhatsApp), offers a fitness tracker band coupled with a personal coach.
"We want to be a preventive healthcare company. We are adding doctors trained in dealing with general medical and lifestyle related issues to our platform," GOQii founder and CEO Vishal Gondal told PTI.
He added that the new band will be priced at Rs 1,999 and will come with three months of subscription.

"With these features and partnership, we want to be at the number one spot in the next 2 quarters," he said.
According to research firm IDC, the wearable market in India clocked just over 4 lakh units in the first quarter of 2016, largely driven by fitness bands.

While Xiaomi was the largest vendor with 27.1 per cent share, GOQii ranked second with 18.1 per cent in the January- March 2016 quarter.
Other players included FitBit (6.2 per cent), Samsung (2.5 per cent) and Motorola (1.4 per cent).
"Technology is transforming healthcare at an incredible pace. We want to offer users an entire spectrum of real-time lifestyle and healthcare services on one single platform," Gondal said.

He added that it is also imperative to understand that addition of doctors to its platform is not a replacement for regular doctors or emergency/chronic situations.
GOQii has partnered with Max Healthcare as their hospital and medical partner and Thyrocare as their diagnostic partner.
Through these partnerships, users needing specialist consultation can benefit by being referred to Max Hospital for further care.
Users can also use the GOQii platform to book a diagnostic appointment with Thyrocare. Post the diagnosis, all the reports generated will be centralised on the GOQii platform within the Health Locker feature. Users will also be able to take a comprehensive Health Risk Assessment (HRA) giving them detailed insights into their overall health situation.

"The health locker acts as a repository for the user's medical diagnostic history making it readily available to all- coaches, users, doctors on or off the platform, with the requisite consent of the user," Gondal said.
GOQii will also enable touchless payment feature on the band in collaboration with Axis Bank.
The new hardware features a sleeker design, enhanced OLED display and comes with an integrated charger and bigger battery.
Apart from auto sleep detection feature, the new band will support third party app integration, helping users get call, SMS, email and WhatsApp notifications on their bands.