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 leading geriatrician at Eastern Virginia Medical School at ODU and board member of the Alzheimer’s Association.
Dr. Okhravi’s first words to Waddell in their meeting have become part of the company’s founding lore: “Steve, I like you, and I like the faucet idea. My problem is I have to call my patients every morning and every night just to remind them to take their medications.”
Waddell’s answer: “Let’s put that in the grant.”
The company won the NIA award—$2.58 million—going three-for-three on federal grants. But the most transformative development was still ahead.
The Camera Problem That Became a Platform
The original smart faucet design included a camera to identify which activities of daily living (ADLs) seniors were attempting—handwashing, toothbrushing, medication adherence. After receiving the NIA grant, the team learned that HIPAA strictly prohibits cameras in bathrooms. The camera was out.
The team successfully requested and received approval to pivot to mmWave radar—a technology that detects sub-millimeter biomechanical signals without ever creating an image. It cannot record. It cannot identify faces. It is private by physics, not policy.
That pivot unlocked everything. mmWave radar proved capable of detecting not just gross movement, but the subtle biomechanical drift—in gait, sleep, hygiene routines, speech, and hydration patterns—that precedes clinical events by weeks or months. The faucet had become a platform.
Introducing Index HealthTech
The Nasoni name served its chapter well. Index HealthTech names the next one. The name is deliberate: Index reflects the company’s flagship clinical tool, the Healthy Habits Index™—a 0–100 behavioral biomarker score that gives clinicians, for the first time, a single number for functional health.
The rebrand reflects a change in name and direction—not in legal standing. Index HealthTech retains the same EIN, federal grant award history, and clean single audit record maintained with EisnerAmper. The company’s track record of NIH and NIA funding carries forward without interruption.
The company’s platform now consists of three integrated components:
Sense™ (patent-pending) — Passive mmWave radar and far-field acoustic sensing hardware. No cameras. No wearables. No friction.
Healthy Habits Index™ (HHI™) (patent-pending) — A 0–100 behavioral biomarker score across six domains: mobility, sleep, hygiene, hydration, speech, and routine. Healthcare has biomarkers for organs. The HHI is a biomarker for function.
Drift Atlas™ (patent-pending) — A population-scale intelligence layer that builds Predictive Avatars—personalized models of each person’s behavioral trajectory—enabling clinicians to intervene before decline becomes crisis.
The company has secured approximately $5 million in NIH and NIA funding, plus more than $85,000 in non-dilutive funding from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC). An additional $2.5 million is pending with the National Institute on Aging, and the company carries a federal non-dilutive grant pipeline exceeding $16.3 million—separate from the pending NIA award. The company has signed a Letter of Intent with Nazareth Home Health for initial pilot deployment, contingent upon NIA grant award, with initial deployments targeting senior living communities and PACE programs as a subsequent expansion market. Clinical partners include Dr. Hamid Okhravi at EVMS/ODU and Dr. Aubrey Knight at Carilion Clinic. The company is currently raising a $2.5 million equity round to accelerate commercial deployment.
“Nasoni was born from a faucet and forged by a pandemic. Index HealthTech is where that journey was always headed—a platform that sees what medicine has always missed: the quiet, measurable drift that precedes every catastrophic health event. We’re not detecting falls. We’re eliminating the conditions that cause them.”
— Steve Waddell, Founder, President & CEO, Index HealthTech
The company is entering the market at a moment when healthcare is shifting from reactive treatment to continuous, preventative monitoring. For the first time, clinicians can measure functional health the way they measure blood pressure or glucose. Index HealthTech is currently engaging investors and senior living operators for initial 2026 deployments and is currently raising a $2.5 million equity round. Investors, pilot partners, and media inquiries are welcome at indexhealthtech.com.
About Index HealthTech
Index HealthTech (formerly Nasoni) is a healthtech company building Behavioral Biomarker Infrastructure for aging adults. Its Sense™ hardware platform uses passive mmWave radar and far-field acoustics to continuously monitor functional status across six domains, producing the Healthy Habits Index™ (HHI™)—a clinician-facing behavioral biomarker score—and Predictive Avatars that model each patient’s individual trajectory of decline through the Drift Atlas™ intelligence layer. The company is headquartered in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia and has secured approximately $5 million in NIH/NIA funding, more than $85,000 in non-dilutive funding from VIPC, and has an additional $2.5 million pending with the National Institute on Aging. Learn more at indexhealthtech.com.
