Marking a New Chapter in Behavioral Biomarker Infrastructure for Aging Adults
Award-winning hardware startup pivots from the bathroom faucet that launched a movement to building the intelligence layer that predicts functional decline — weeks before a crisis occurs. SUFFOLK, Va. — Index HealthTech, formerly known as Nasoni, today announced a formal rebrand marking its evolution into a healthcare technology company building what it calls Behavioral Biomarker Infrastructure—passive, continuous, privacy-preserving monitoring that detects functional decline before falls, hospitalizations, and loss of independence. The company’s patent-pending platform combines mmWave radar sensing with the Healthy Habits Index™ (HHI™)—a 0–100 behavioral biomarker score—and the Drift Atlas™ intelligence layer to give clinicians, for the first time, a predictive window into each patient’s functional trajectory. The company retains the same EIN, federal grant award history, and clean single audit record maintained with EisnerAmper. This is a change in name and direction, not in legal standing. Index HealthTech is among the first companies to define and deploy behavioral biomarkers as a continuous clinical signal. The rebrand arrives at a critical inflection point, driven by the SBIR program’s reauthorization this week for five years through 2031—securing the single largest source of non-dilutive innovation funding for U.S. small businesses—and increased policy focus on preventative care. More than 55 million people worldwide live with dementia, with nearly 10 million new cases diagnosed annually. Falls among adults 65 and older cost the U.S. healthcare system more than $50 billion each year—yet the behavioral drift that precedes those falls goes undetected for weeks or months before any clinical event occurs. Index HealthTech is positioned at the intersection of aging, AI, and preventative healthcare to address this gap, in a market driven by rising fall risk, dementia prevalence, and accelerating federal investment in aging-in-place infrastructure. A Faucet, a Pandemic, and an Unexpected Phone Call The story of Index HealthTech begins with a faucet. Nasoni launched as the creator of an award-winning bathroom faucet with a built-in manual water fountain—a novel, elegant product that earned industry recognition and built early consumer momentum. Then, in 2019, the first round of U.S.-China tariffs arrived and wiped out the company’s entire $50,000 marketing budget overnight. Three months later, COVID-19 shut down the world. Every planned trade show was cancelled. The retail channel evaporated. The board convened to find a path forward. One investor board member had a personal connection—he knew the head of product development at Home Depot—and suggested making the introduction. Waddell volunteered to drive to their headquarters in Georgia. COVID made that impossible—no visitors. So he shipped them one of his award-winning fountain faucets instead, followed up with a virtual call, and waited. The call ended with four words from their head of product development: “Our customers prefer traditional faucets.” Waddell thanked them for their time and moved on. A year later, his friend Tiffany Krumins—a Season 1 Shark Tank alumna who had struck a deal with Barbara Corcoran, and who had Nasoni’s fountain faucets installed in her own home—sent him an email. The subject line read: “I’m so mad!” Inside the email was a screenshot from Facebook: a Home Depot advertisement for a Glacier Bay fountain faucet—in black, nearly identical to the faucet Waddell had shipped them—made of cheap plastic. Home Depot had said no, kept the faucet, and launched their own version. It was the third black swan in three years. The 25% China tariff was the first. COVID was the second. This was the third. For most startups, any one of them would have been fatal. For Nasoni, all three together cleared the runway for something far bigger. A fortuitous introduction connected Founder and CEO Steve Waddell with Dr. Lisa Koperna, a spinal cord injury (SCI) specialist. Her words reoriented everything: “If I had a sensor version of this faucet, we could help SCI patients live more independently.” That single sentence became the company’s first federal grant application. The company won. Then won again. The smart faucet SBIR Phase I led to a Phase II award. But Waddell’s mind kept returning to a problem he’d already watched play out in his own family—one the original Nasoni faucet had been designed to solve. A standard bathroom faucet is too low to allow someone to wash another person’s hair at the sink. That design failure had sent his in-laws into the shower. He wanted to build a taller, smarter faucet that would make that safer. Then, a second personal moment changed the trajectory entirely. A Fall That Should Never Have Happened Waddell’s father-in-law was declining with dementia. His mother-in-law needed to wash his hair—but a standard bathroom faucet sits too low to get one’s head underneath. The shower was the only option. While helping him there, he slipped. She tried to catch him. They both fell. A year later, it became personal again—this time, closer. Waddell’s father, Lieutenant Colonel John Waddell—a decorated U.S. Army combat veteran, fiercely independent, living alone about thirty minutes away—started falling. Waddell searched for something that could help his family understand not just whether a fall had happened, but why. What was changing? What was declining? He found nothing. The questions that haunted the family were simple and devastating: Did he fall today? If he did, how long did he lie there? Is this the fall that takes away his independence? Eventually, the answer to that last question was yes. Lt. Col. Waddell was moved to assisted living. Within six months of losing his independence—the thing he had built his entire life around—he gave up on life. The family lost him. “A fall is never the beginning of the story,” Waddell reflects. “It’s the final chapter of a long, quiet decline. I lost my father to that decline. I built Sense so that nobody else has to.” That conviction—that the solution had to be preventative, not reactive—drove Waddell to apply for a Direct to Phase II grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to build a sensor platform specifically for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. He needed a gerontologist. He found the best one in the region: Dr. Hamid Okhravi, a
Index HealthTech Secures NIH Phase II Grant to Expand Radar-Based Fall Prevention Technology
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Index HealthTech Secures NIH Phase II Grant to Expand Radar-Based Fall Prevention Technology Across Home Health Agencies NORFOLK, VA — April 7, 2026 — Index HealthTech, a pioneer in privacy-first behavioral intelligence for aging care, today announced it has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to accelerate the deployment of its radar-based monitoring platform across home health agencies nationwide. The $1.2 million grant will fund a 24-month clinical validation study in partnership with three regional home health networks, expanding on earlier NIH-backed research conducted in collaboration with Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). This grant validates what our clinical partners have seen firsthand — that continuous, between-visit behavioral intelligence is the missing layer in home-based care,” said [CEO Name], Chief Executive Officer of Index HealthTech. “We are closing the visibility gap that leads to preventable falls, hospitalizations, and ER visits. Index HealthTech’s flagship platform combines three core components — Sense™, the Healthy Habits Index™ (HHI), and the Drift Atlas™ — to passively monitor movement, sleep, hygiene, hydration, and routine behavior using millimeter-wave radar. Unlike camera-based systems, the technology creates no images and requires no wearables, making it immediately accepted by residents and families. ABOUT INDEX HEALTHTECH Index HealthTech is a Norfolk, Virginia-based health technology company developing privacy-first behavioral intelligence solutions for home health agencies and aging care providers. Backed by NIH research funding and validated through academic clinical partnerships, Index HealthTech’s platform delivers continuous insight between care visits — enabling earlier intervention, reduced hospitalizations, and better outcomes for aging adults.
