Scanadu Scout

» see scanadu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Nothing about this one travels. A crowdfunding campaign that shipped to backers in 2015, a device whose legal status in the United States was "investigational", and a regulator in Maryland deciding when the study attached to it had to close: that is an American story end to end, and it was over before the product had a retail life anywhere else. Turkey never saw a Scanadu Scout outside of a tech blog's photo gallery.

Scanadu was founded in February 2011 by Walter De Brouwer and Misha Chellam, working out of the NASA Ames Research Park at Moffett Field, which is the kind of return address that does half your fundraising for you. The pitch was Star Trek, openly: a tricorder, the handheld thing a doctor waves at you to learn everything at once. The prototype was unveiled on 29 November 2012. It was a white disc you pressed to your forehead, and it claimed to read pulse, blood oxygen, temperature, respiratory rate and a single-lead ECG without a cuff or a needle.

The Indiegogo campaign in the summer of 2013 took $1.66 million from 8,800 backers across more than a hundred countries, which was an enormous number for medical hardware and made Scanadu one of the most-cited contenders for the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE. Institutional money came behind it fast: $10.5 million in November 2013 from Relay Ventures with Tony Hsieh and Jerry Yang's funds in the round, then $35 million in April 2015, bringing the total near $49.7 million. Devices started reaching backers in February 2015.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

What made the Scout feel real was that it arrived. Most of the 2013 crowdfunded-health class never shipped anything, and this one was in people's hands, producing readings, with an app that logged them. Reviewers were cautious about accuracy but the thing worked, and for about two years it was the most convincing piece of evidence that consumer medical sensing was a product category rather than a pitch deck.

The legal structure underneath it was the part almost nobody read. Scanadu could not sell the Scout as a medical device, because it had no FDA clearance to do so. What it had instead was permission to run an investigational study, and every backer who pressed one to their forehead was a participant in that study. The money they paid was framed as a contribution toward research, not a purchase. The distinction sat in the fine print of a campaign whose headline was a Star Trek prop.

~ the day it died ~

On 13 December 2016, Scanadu emailed its backers to say support for the Scout would end. The explanation leaned entirely on the structure above: the Scout was an investigational device, the study it belonged to had reached its endpoint with data collection finishing in November 2016, and FDA rules require an investigational study to be brought to closure with its devices deactivated. The deactivation date was 15 May 2017. After that the app would not talk to the hardware and the hardware could not talk to anything else.

The reaction was immediate and ugly. Backers who had paid somewhere between $149 and $269 pointed out that they had been told they were buying a device, and now owned a disc. One person said they had bought a hundred of them. The hashtag people settled on was #SCAMadu, there were public calls for a class action and for Indiegogo to issue refunds, and the press coverage was uniformly on the backers' side.

~ what got buried with it ~

Scanadu's defense was that it had always said this, and in the narrow legal sense that defense holds. The company did not invent the rule it cited. But the company also ran a campaign built on a science fiction promise, took money from 8,800 people in a hundred countries, shipped them hardware, and then switched that hardware off by remote command on a date they had not chosen. Whatever the paperwork said, the thing people experienced was a purchase being revoked.

The company itself kept going for a while under a new name, inui Health, chasing an at-home urinalysis product instead, and was bought by the Israeli firm Healthy.io in June 2020. The domain outlasted both. Request scanadu.com today and it lands on a page about addiction treatment that has nothing to do with any of this.

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