Company Performance Metrics
- Nilanjan Banerjee: Chief Science Officer (CSO)
- Steve Waddell: President & CEO (Founder)Past Role: Reed Integration, Vice President, Business Development & Programs
Index HealthTech is a medtech company headquartered in Suffolk, Virginia, building Behavioral Biomarker Infrastructure for aging adults. The platform combines passive ambient sensing, AI-driven behavioral scoring, and population-scale predictive intelligence to make functional decline measurable — and actionable — before it becomes a crisis.
The
platform has three layers. Sense™ is a passive sensing system using millimeter-wave radar and far-field acoustics in everyday form factors. No cameras. No wearables. No compliance burden. Healthy Habits Index™ (HHI™) translates daily behavior into a continuous 0–100 functional health score across six domains: mobility, sleep, hydration, hygiene, speech, and routine. Drift Atlas™ is the population-scale intelligence layer that generates Predictive Avatars™ — personalized behavioral trajectories that interpret each person's data against their own longitudinal model. The category Index is building — quantitative, domain-structured behavioral indices — is unclaimed across the major-player patent landscape, with a multi-layer patent portfolio under U.S. patent counsel of record at Mainline Intellectual Property.
The platform is built on a principle the company calls privacy by physics, not policy — privacy enforced by what the hardware physically cannot capture, not by what software promises to delete. This makes Sense viable for populations underserved by today's monitoring approaches: people with dementia and cognitive impairment, frail elderly, stroke survivors, and veterans with PTSD, who cannot tolerate wearables or homes amenable to camera-based monitoring.
Index HealthTech has been awarded approximately $4.8M in NIH SBIR funding from the National Institute on Aging and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with active clinical work underway. The company has executed a partnership with Canary Speech to integrate vocal biomarker analytics into HHI's speech domain. Clinical and research partners include the Roberts Comprehensive Memory Center at Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences (Eastern Virginia Medical School / Old Dominion University), Carilion Clinic, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Initial deployment focuses on PACE programs, memory care, and senior living — risk-bearing care environments where preventable functional decline drives the largest share of avoidable cost.
The company was founded by Steve Waddell, a 25-year veteran of Newport News Shipbuilding's nuclear programs who authored the aircraft carrier risk management process recognized by the Defense Acquisition University as an industry best practice. The mission is personal. Waddell's father, Lt. Col. John Waddell, a decorated U.S. Army combat veteran, declined for months before two falls in six weeks led to assisted living and his death within six months of losing his independence. Index HealthTech exists so the next generation of aging adults gets a warning his father never got.