Hiyd packs a health tracker into a disc that clips onto any watch

Hiyd’s first product is a small, slim disc that attaches to the back of a watch via microsuction — a textured-silicone material with hundreds of tiny vacuum pockets per square inch that lets the sensor sit flush without magnets or adhesive, so it leaves no residue and doesn’t interfere with watches that use magnets to keep time. Founder Salah Batroukh said the ethos behind the design is that health tracking shouldn’t force people to change how they look.

The sensor is 2.7 mm thick, weighs 7 grams, and uses a microsuction layer just 0.3 mm thick. It collects heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep staging, movement, calories burned, and VO2 max estimations — biometrics Batroukh says are comparable to leading wearables — and syncs to an iOS or Android app. To fine-tune the sensor, Hiyd’s team films itself doing activities such as walking, jogging, and running, then labels the resulting datasets to train the device’s AI. “The one thing that AI is really good at is data analysis, so we can basically fit a lot of heuristic analysis into our sets really quickly,” Batroukh said.

On its app, Hiyd is also building out nutrition tracking — not to count calories, but to surface insights on how eating habits affect sleep quality or workout performance, such as flagging that working out late at night correlates with worse sleep for a given user.

Batroukh spent about seven years as a manufacturing design engineer at Apple before starting Hiyd, wanting to see if he could design something great without a global brand behind him. He’s joined by co-founders Omar Shakir, a mechanical engineer serving as CTO, and Mahamad Charawi, head of software, who previously co-led the Y Combinator-backed startup Laudspeaker through its sale. Hiyd is competing this week as one of the top 20 companies at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, and plans to launch a Kickstarter in November; more than 16,000 people have already made deposits to secure its first units.

Why it matters

If Hiyd’s microsuction approach holds up outside the lab, it could let health tracking ride on whatever watch — mechanical or smart — a person already wears, instead of asking them to trade it for a fitness band.