THE anecdote goes that as a third- year medical student Christopher McCann got the idea for a single piece of wearable technology that could monitor individual patients and feed their vital signs back to doctors and nurses.

While studying medicine at Dundee University, the computer science graduate’s grandmother’s health began to deteriorate. And the insight garnered during intensive on-ward training, combined with the frustration at not being able to make a meaningful difference to his grandmother’s condition left him firmly believing he could improve care.

Having believed his background in technology could “only be helpful in delivering clinical practice”, Mr McCann was surprised at the lack of what he calls technological disruption within healthcare.

“Coming from that background I thought processes could become automated, it could be made much easier, automatically telling a nurse which patients they had to see, not being reliant on a nurse spending three hours a shift checking patients – that could be changed by technology, and ultimately I knew it was a problem that could be solved so I thought, ‘let’s do it’.”

Snap40 was incorporated in July 2014 and following the largest round of seed funding in Scotland, at £2 million, and a £1m small business research initiative (SBRI) healthcare development contract with NHS England, Mr McCann is in confident mood.

“All of the momentum is with us,” he says. “I’m really happy with where we are just now. We need to keep going, keep making progress, but right now it couldn’t be going much better.”

Mr McCann said the first few months of business focused on how he could build hardware that could monitor the required vital signs, and how he could build algorithms into the software that could analyse the captured data.

A first step was to build a strong, reliable team. Technology veteran David Bowie came on board as a co-founder and is chief operating officer. Another co-founder, Stewart Whiting, a former Microsoft engineer in Silicon Valley, arrived as data science lead.

The biggest challenge Mr McCann and his partners faced was funding.

“The business we decided to pursue is just about as hard as it gets,” says Mr McCann. “You’ve got a hardware component within the medical space, which is highly regulated, and you are trying to sell it into a market that is pretty conservative.”

The Scottish Institute of Enterprise, Scottish Enterprise and Scottish EDGE all helped the company get moving with series of grants before it began to raise private equity money.”

By the end of his third year, Mr McCann realised something had to give and so he abandoned his studies to throw everything into making the company work. “We have done everything in parallel, we’ve been raising money, building the product, trying to get regulatory clearance and get commercial tractions all at the same time, which is one of the reasons we have been able to do things as fast as we have, but it’s a lot of work,” he says.

This is not Mr McCann’s first business and the lessons learned from his previous experience are being put to good use with Snap40.

Towards the end of his integrated masters degree in computer science, Mr McCann set up Dizeo, a platform for helping children aged eight to 13 learn about social networking. Ultimately, the business failed, and although he calls it a “huge disappointment” at the time, he adds: “The lessons learned were enormous, and not just from a different approach to practical problems in running the business, but also in the resilience required, the dogmatic determination to make something happen.”

Timing, he says, was not with him with Dizeo, but of Snap40, he says: “As a business we’re arriving at the perfect time, and timing is everything. We have come along when health services are looking for products like ours to help them as their workload increases.”

He is keen to stress that the device is complementary to doctors and nurses, and will make their jobs easier, not redundant.

As much work has gone into raising funding as creating the product, but while the £2m seed funding – led by Par Equity – was a record for a Scottish business, Mr McCann says it is a secondary focus.

“It’s a big validation of what we’ve done, but I have never been fixated with the amount of the funding.

“I’m fixated on building a great product, achieving our goals and the funding is a consequence of that,” he says. “Our focus is on our product and our customer; not on raising investment.”

The monitoring is fundamental to the device’s success, but it is how the data is analysed that will make it count.

“We spend a lot of thinking about how we can best shape our products and systems to keep patients as safe as possible,” he says. “We want to be the beacon for how things are done in this area.”

While he describes the sector as an “incredibly hot space” Mr McCann welcomes competition, saying it all highlights how technology can help patients.

“One of the reasons we wanted to robustly determine vital signs is because if we can say what they should be we can tell when you are not well.

“The product is a simple idea but the implementation of that idea is super hard. Everything along our technology stack is difficult to do. How do we reliably extract vital signs from the patient through to how we do analytics? We’ve worked really hard to get that right,” he says.

“The challenge is not just about getting the vital signs, but reliably and at scale. And how do you do it in 1,000 patients who are all moving about? It’s not just about getting blood pressure, it’s the layer of intelligence on the back of that which identifies which patient the clinician has to see.”

Pressed on a full launch date, Mr McCann is reticent to give a prediction, but he says the company expects CE Marking to open up the European market in the next few months.

And then there is the huge US market – where Mr McCann says the same problem exists.

“We believe we have got something of value for not just the UK but the US and beyond,” he says. “We’ve already built amazing connections in the US.”

He says there is a will from healthcare providers for the technology, but the key is to prove that it can do what it says it can.

“They legitimately have to make sure we’ve solved things from a security and governance point of view, that we can provide an actual and not a theorised benefit. And I get the financial pressures they are under, so this is about us working hand in hand with them at a senior level. We need to make sure we deliver something that works for all of them.”