NUST graduates launch Pakistan’s first Kickstarter campaign for wearable tech

Trequant Inc., today, launched their Kickstarter campaign to fund their tremor quantifying watch. Trequant, a watch to assist patients of tremors, is the face of Pakistan’s first campaign for a wearable tech gadget and the first ever wearable device aimed for tremor patients. The team has been testing the product for 2 years now and the whole purpose of launching the Kickstarter would be to raise enough funds to bring the watch to a wider audience so that more people can benefit from it.

Trequant is headed by a team of young NUST graduates, Fawad Ejaz, Usman Shabbir and Usman Amjed. The trio was also featured on our annual feature ‘Pakistan’s 25 High Achievers Under 25‘. The venture started off as Fawad’s struggle to find a solution to a problem that had gripped his family for generations. Seeing the trouble his uncles had to go through dealing with ET, Fawad realized that this disease could one day effect him too. He sat down with his brother, a Movement Disorder Specialist, to talk about a solution for Essential Tremors. Still an undergrad student, Fawad, together with Usman Shabbir, did their Final Year Project on a similar tremor detection idea. Their third co-founder, Usman Amjed, joined them after graduation.

ET is a nerve disorder characterized by uncontrollable shaking, or tremors in different parts of the body: hands, arms, head, voice box, tongue. These are the primary symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, Dystonia, Essential Tremors and many others. Currently, 220 million people worldwide suffer from it and Trequant is hoping to change the lives of all these people.

Trequant is not a cure for ET. It is more of a tool that can help the effected people be independent and take control of their disease. Designed as a wristwatch, it fits seamlessly into the patient’s everyday life giving them the privacy that they need. It can be paired with a smartphone or a laptop to save the tremor patterns detected by the watch which can then be stored on a cloud. With the help of Trequant, patients would not just be able to get the readings of their tremors, but they would also be able to track their tremors in different scenarios, activities and their day to day behaviors. They would be able to understand the effect of let’s say broccoli or wine or swimming or even smoking. The tremor patterns recorded by the watch would help doctors in diagnosis or picking the right medicine for the patient.

A major new update by the team is the introduction of Trequant Band. It can not only be used for hand tremors but for leg, neck, and head tremors as well. It is specifically geared for people with Primary Orthostatic Tremors, who have tremors in their legs with really high frequencies of upto 21 Hz, sometimes even more.

Another feature they’ve added recently is Tremor Circle. With this new feature they are trying to create a unique chain between patients so that they can connect with each other, explain their tremor anomalies and help each other understand their tremors better.

Trequant is a former Plan9 incubatee. They were the runners-up at FICS 2015, they were also selected for the i2i Challenge Cup’s Regional Finals in Dubai. The team has won numerous awards in their two years since they’ve been active, collecting an impressive Rs. 30 Million in total prize money. Recently, with the help of Google for Entrepreneurs and Black-box they have relocated their main office to US.