IntelligentM wristband

Company: IntelligentM, Sarasota

Principals: Seth Freedman, Dave Mullinix and Dr. Andrew Fine.

The big idea: The IntelligentM wristband, which monitors doctors' hand hygiene, is based on staggering medical statistics.

For example, one in 20 hospital patients will get an infection after being admitted, and 50% of those stem from poor hand hygiene. About 100,000 people with those infections died last year, says the firm, which cites Centers for Disease Control research.

“We've got a solution that will address a major problem,” says IntelligentM co-founder Seth Freedman. “It's easy to get passionate about this, because we are helping save people's lives.”

The essence of IntelligentM's technology is Radio Frequency Identification, which is built to read data from far away. But IntelligentM flips the RFID technology to read single tags at small distances.

The IntelligentM wristband tracks when, and how well, a physician washes his or her hands.

Freedman, who has been involved in several other startups, helped launch the firm in 2010. The firm has since spent about $500,000 in startup capital, mostly on product development. It was also chosen to participate in two national health care accelerator business programs.

IntelligentM has six clients: three hospitals, two medical practices and a long-term care facility. Freedman projects the company could have up to 24 clients, which would translate to $3.5 million to $5 million in sales, by the end of 2014. The business model is to build volume through a software as a service approach and charge per user within a hospital or medical facility.

“The beauty about this is it's trailing-edge technology,” says Freedman. “We priced it so that hospitals don't have to make a huge investment in technology.”