Urify

Project overview

Urify is my current venture, solo-founded and incubated at Imperial College London's We Innovate programme. It's a simple, low-cost, colour-changing test designed to flag possible early signs of kidney disease from a routine urine check, turning a screening that normally requires a lab visit into something people can do for themselves, early enough to act on.

Kidney disease is often silent until it's advanced. Urify's premise is that catching an early warning sign shouldn't require special equipment or a clinic appointment. It should be as simple and legible as a colour change.

As solo founder I lead a cross-functional team spanning medicine and engineering, translating complex clinical research into a scalable product and business model.

Why a cleaning tablet, and not a test

This is the part that decided the product's shape. I worked it out before I made anything.

The disease hides, so the person never goes

Chronic kidney disease is quiet for years. A person can lose a lot of kidney function and feel completely fine. No pain, no warning, nothing to point at.

That matters more than it sounds. People go to a doctor because something feels wrong. If nothing feels wrong, they do not go. The disease is easy enough to detect. The hard part is catching it, because the person is never in the room.

So the existing answers all miss

I went through what already exists. Each one works, and each one still fails, for the same reason. They all ask the person to do something new.

The evidence: even a free test posted to your door does not get used

I wanted to know how small the friction has to be before people stop. So I looked at the strongest case I could find. The NHS YouScreen trial in London posted free cervical screening kits to women who had not come in for their smear test. The kit is free. It arrives at the house. You take the sample yourself. Nobody has to book it, travel for it, or see a nurse.

That number changed how I thought about the problem. Cost and access had already been removed here. What was left was the act itself: open it, do it, package it, post it. Four small steps, and around seven in eight people stopped.

So I stopped treating friction as something to reduce. Any friction at all is too much. The test cannot ask for four steps, or one step. It has to ask for none.

The same trial makes the point twice over. When a nurse handed the kit to a woman in person, at an appointment she was already at, uptake was far higher than when it arrived in the post. Nothing about the test changed. Only the moment it reached her did.

So the test has to hide inside a habit people already have

So it has to sit inside something people already do, without thinking, and without deciding to.

Then I looked for the habit. Almost everyone already buys something to clean the toilet. They buy it without a thought, they use it without a thought, and they replace it when it runs out. Nobody has to be persuaded.

So Urify is a toilet cleaning tablet that gives you a health prompt. You buy it because you want a clean toilet. It does that job properly. While it does, it watches for an early sign of kidney disease, and it tells you by changing colour. The prompt is small and it is yours to act on. You never signed up for a health product, and your week stays exactly the same.

Six months, zero to one

I started with a research question and no product. Six months later I was presenting to the NHS. Here is what happened in between, in order.

1. 01

   Research

   I read the clinical literature on chronic kidney disease. The pattern was clear. The disease is quiet for years, and most people find out late. Screening exists, but it needs a clinic. So the gap sat in access, and detection was never the hard part.

2. 02

   I went and asked nephrologists

   A medical product needs more than reading. I arranged meetings with kidney specialists and asked them what they would actually trust. They told me which marker matters, what a false positive costs a patient, and where a home test would fit in a real care pathway. That changed the product.

3. 03

   I learned the chemistry

   I trained as a designer, so I had to become useful in a lab first. I learned the reaction the test depends on, then made and remade the tablet myself until the colour change was clear enough for a person to read without a chart.

   

4. 04

   I built the team

   One person cannot do medicine and engineering at once. I brought in medical and engineering collaborators, and I kept the direction. My job was to hold the product together while each of them went deep.

5. 05

   I built a camera app to read the result

   Colour is hard for some people to judge. Lighting changes it, and so does eyesight. So I built a small companion app that reads the tablet through the phone camera. It uses computer vision to compare what it sees against the reference colours, and then it says in words what it found. The person gets a plain answer instead of a judgement call.

   

6. 06

   I presented to the NHS

   At the end of the six months I presented Urify to the NHS North West London ICHP team. That is the audience that decides whether a screening idea is worth anything. Getting in front of them was the point of the whole six months.

Product management & strategy

• Product delivery: coordinated resources to lead a cross-functional team of medical and engineering collaborators, turning clinical research into a working product and business model
• Roadmap & direction: conducted market and business analysis to define product direction, feature prioritisation and user requirements
• User-centric design: built and engaged an early-user community together with patients, charities and NHS experts to drive agile product iteration

Validation & funding

Urify won 2nd prize at Idea to Impact, was named an Imperial We Innovate semi-finalist, and ranked Global Top 20 for the James Dyson Award alongside a UK national runner-up placing. I formulated the data-driven business case that went on to secure non-dilutive funding for the venture.

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Stakeholders & partnerships

I've been invited to explore a joint pilot programme with the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer to help scale Urify's hardware capabilities, and to present the product to the NHS and at TEDx. Urify has been featured in global media including Reuters and Dezeen.

Recognition

The product itself is live at urify.co.