How much water have you had today? Enough, or are you dehydrated? What about when you exercise, do you drink enough water? Or perhaps you’re one of those who drinks way too much water, but don’t know it? Or perhaps you’re just curious and want to know how much water you’re consuming. Hidrate Me is an app, connecting your phone via Bluetooth to a smart water bottle which tracks how much water you’re drinking. The 24 ounce/ 710 milliliter water bottle has a sensor built into the lid with an easily replaceable battery built into its lid, and when you take a sip it tracks the amount of water you’ve drank and syncs it to your phone. The bottle is made from BPA-free food safe plastic and is dishwasher safe, and the cap also takes note of when you’ve removed it – so you can clean your water bottle without distorting the amount of water it tracks. You can set a daily goal for water consumption, and the apps recommendations are based on factors such as your weight. Hidrate Me will track your progress, your history of water consumption, and will even remind you to drink more water if you haven’t had enough through the day or if you forget to. The bottles will ship in late 2015/early 2016, and the app will be available for download once that happens. In the mean time, you can place orders through the Kickstarter campaign.
In September of 2014, Nadya (currently CEO of Hidrate Me) brought together a team including four other University of Minnesota students for the Google Startup Weekend in Minneapolis to build a smart water bottle prototype. They built a bottle which tracked water intake and synced it to a smart phone app in only 54 hours. This product won third place, with potential customers asking when the bottles would be available for purchase – and the team realized that such a product held huge potential. After seven months of working on the product during evenings and weekends, the team was accepted into the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator Program (powered by Techstars), which is a three-month intensive on-site experience in Kansas City. For that program, ten mobile-health companies from around the world receive funding and mentorship to accelerate their businesses, and it culminated with a demo day on June 4, 2015 where each company showcased their products in front of investors, healthcare professionals, and tech enthusiasts.
To know more about Hidrate ME, visit: http://hidrate.me
