Small devices aim for big impact at Inspire Living

Kristi Buckles Otto is the CEO of Inspire Living, coming to the Memphis ZeroTo510 Memphis Medical Device Accelerator Program from the Washington D.C. metro area. Kristi loves marketing and business development challenges like working with innovators, big thinkers and visionaries to help them focus on ideas, market need and communication.

Inspire Living, Inc. was founded with a mission to make the world healthier and sustainable through innovation. Kristi and company are hitting the ground running with VitalHugs, a Pediatric Smart Band and mobile health platform, for at-home use with children. Designed to takes the guesswork out of urgent care decisions, the VitalHugs solution is used to quickly transmit a patient’s temperature, respiration rate and other vitals directly to a physician who can then recommend an appropriate course of action.  
Kristi Buckles Otto, CEO of Inspire Living
The device was originally developed to aid healthcare workers in the early detection of pneumonia in children in developing countries. Kristi worked with them as part of “Delivering the Breath of Life - mHealth for developing Countries,” an innovative partnership to bring accessible technology to the field for those who need it most. The impact of a device like this can seem incremental or small to some, but the impact will be massive since pneumonia alone is the number one killer of children worldwide.

The team at Inspire chose Memphis' Zeroto510 Medical Device Accelerator for their focus on accelerating devices to market and their numerous past successes with other companies. Kristi said, “This program has a great reputation and success rate for startups. The medical device industry is complicated so it was important to us to have that focus, support and mentorship in the medical space.”

Kristi previously was President and CMO, Guardit Technologies, another sensor company that pioneered smart object sensing, and she was President and Owner of KBO Consulting for 10 years, where she helped clients formulate marketing strategies for a wide range of service and consumer industries. Her educational background includes an International MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management; BA, Languages, Business, International Relations from the University of Arizona; and she also studied International Politics/Relations at American University.

This story is part of a series reviewing the ZeroTo510 and Start Co. Demo Day on August 13. The ZeroTo510 Medical Device Accelerator is a first-in-kind entrepreneurial accelerator program that focuses on leveraging key regional strengths of the Memphis area: biomedical research and medical device manufacturing. The goal of ZeroTo510 is to help medical device startups navigate the startup process, refine their business models and complete the Food and Drug Administration’s 510(k) premarket notification filing.