A company called MyHealthPal is looking to make lives easier for people living with Parkinson’s Disease. Their iOS app and analytics platform aggregate patients’ day-to-day data points into a dashboard, making the information easy to retrieve and understand.

The startup has secured an initial seed funding of £500,000, and launched a trial with Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

MyHealthPal’s HIPAA-certified service complies with EU and US data privacy to ensure security of data.A mix of private and institutional investors provided the money, including VC firm Proxy Ventures, Andrew MacKay, chairman of Yapp Brothers and previously director of IG Group Holdings (lead investor), angel investor Will Armitage, and health and medical business expert Terence Bradley.

MyHealthPal was founded by Mike Barlow who himself was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at age 41, two years ago. The idea to make a company of its own came after he found out that there was no effective way to manage and measure the effectiveness of his medication, track symptoms, log mood, diet, exercise and other metrics and their impact on his quality of life. In that sense, MyHealthPal’s solution has an edge over competing products as it’s made by an actual patient.

Beyond providing tools for managing Parkinson’s Disease, MyHealthPal also allows users to donate their anonimized data in return for a share of the revenues that data generates to scientific research institutions and charities supporting research and care. The HIPAA-certified service complies with EU and US data privacy to ensure security of data.

Ultimately, the goal is to enable research and data scientists to “query large volumes of data,” which is why MyHealthPal is an interesting business for both investors and medical research institutions.

Beyond Mount Sinai, the company is looking to partner with other institutions and charities, and had apparently already approached these in the UK and US.

[Via: TechCrunch]