Focused on Mobile Cardiac Monitoring, How Elephant Healthcare Dances: IPO Filing Highlights

Soon, a smart garment poised to become the world’s first of its kind, specifically tailored for athletes and intense fitness enthusiasts, will hit the market. By utilizing fabric electrodes that maintain contact with the skin, this smart clothing can monitor various metrics such as heart rate, cardiac load, and exercise volume. It provides users with more professional and safe training guidance, including recommendations on appropriate exercise intensity to prevent physical injury from overtraining.

This smart garment was jointly developed by two companies: a well-known domestic sports apparel brand and an emerging player focused on mobile medical product R&D—Jining Zhongke Daxiang Medical (hereinafter referred to as “Daxiang Medical”). The partnership between the two arose from a serendipitous encounter. At a trade fair, a product designer from the sports apparel company took a strong interest in Daxiang Medical’s products, proactively reached out, and after several rounds of discussions, the two parties decided to launch the smart sports garment project.

Elephant Medical is a subsidiary of the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and has received angel investment from Zhicheng Zhongke, ICT’s incubator.

According to Chen Yuanfei, co-founder of Daxiang Medical, mobile healthcare is a key segment among the incubation projects at Zhicheng Zhongke. Other areas include environmental protection and smart home solutions. As the mobile healthcare project, centered on cardiac monitoring products, has progressed smoothly, Zhicheng Zhongke incubated and established Daxiang Medical in June this year.

Although Daxiang Medical was established only recently, research and development trials for its first-generation ECG monitoring product, HelloFit, began as early as July 2013, with the product launching in early 2014. After more than two years of development, the product’s features have been progressively refined, incorporating multiple independently developed core technologies and attracting a stable base of partners.

 Group Photo of the Daxiang Medical Team in Jining

(Elephant Medical Website:www.eleph.cn)

HelloFit, an Export-Oriented Consumer Electronics Brand

HelloFit is a portable, home-use single-lead smart ECG monitoring device. Compact in size, it is paired with a dedicated mobile app. The smartphone and the monitoring device connect via Bluetooth. During use, users attach electrode pads to the left chest. Through algorithmic processing, heart rate values and waveform graphs are displayed intuitively on the app interface. Additional features include a cardiac health score, analytical result reports, alerts for abnormal heart rates, and trend curves showing changes over time.

Historical records formed by multiple measurements are synchronized and uploaded to the cloud. A single app account can add multiple members, enabling the storage and analysis of the entire family’s data in the cloud, which can then be shared with friends and relatives via QQ, WeChat, Weibo, and other platforms.



Chen Yuanfei introduced that HelloFit supports both Chinese and English, has obtained CE certification for European electronic consumer products and RoHS safety certification, thus enabling exports overseas. Priced at 598 yuan, HelloFit is sold in China through online platforms such as Tmall and Baidu Future Store, as well as offline channels. Including overseas orders, tens of thousands of units have been shipped to date. “We have established partnerships with multiple organizations, including Zhongwei Laikang, China Mobile, Sichuan Telecom, Shaanxi Broadcasting & Television Network, and Huaxia Liangzi. These entities serve both as distribution channels and customers, often placing bulk orders for thousands of units at a time.”

The Hierarchical Development from Home Healthcare to Medical Devices

Nevertheless, Chen Yuanfei believes that the market potential remains substantial, given that annual shipments of tens of thousands of units are dwarfed by the tens of millions of cardiac patients in China each year. On one hand, although the first-generation product adopted the state-of-the-art integrated ECG chip solution, its signal acquisition and filtering algorithms still require improvement. On the other hand, users demand products with more comprehensive performance, medical-grade quality, and longer monitoring durations. Therefore, Chen Yuanfei decided to lead his team in developing the second-generation, medical-grade flexible dynamic ECG monitoring patch, inticare.

As a single-lead wearable ECG patch, Inticare features comprehensive functional upgrades compared to the first-generation HelloFit, primarily targeting patients with chronic conditions and those undergoing postoperative rehabilitation. It supports 24-hour continuous use, comprehensively analyzes multiple indicators, and provides more holistic health monitoring through an integrated “software + hardware + cloud + physician” model.

Chen Yuanfei stated that, leveraging ICT resources, Daxiang Medical has established long-term partnerships with Beijing Anzhen Hospital, Fuwai Cardiovascular Disease Hospital, and Qilu Hospital since the project’s initiation in 2013.

“Our algorithmic model was developed under the guidance and review of cardiology experts, with data benchmarked against hospital-grade large-scale equipment and subjected to clinical validation to ensure that measurement results comply with clinical standards,” said Chen Yuanfei. To this end, the R&D team has expanded from its initial three members to 20, notably bringing in Dr. Li Ming, a distinguished expert, as Technical Director.

Dr. Li Ming, a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, joined a renowned American medical device company in 2005. As a core team member, he successfully developed the world’s first subcutaneously implantable ECG sensor and holds more than ten U.S. technical patents. Leveraging Dr. Li’s professional expertise, Elephant Medical has set its long-term goal to develop third-generation implantable medical-grade products, which are medical devices primarily designed for critically ill patients.

Elephant Medical now has a fully staffed R&D team comprising more than 20 professionals, including algorithm engineers specializing in wearable devices and biomedical signal processing, hardware and embedded systems engineers who have won multiple awards in technology competitions, an industrial designer mentored by a judge for the international Red Dot Award, and quality engineers with extensive experience in product manufacturing. Chen Yuanfei stated that ICT, as a national-level research institution, not only provides continuous access to government-funded research grants and laboratory facilities but also offers Elephant Medical greater support in areas such as technological R&D, team building, and resource integration.

Chen Yuanfei told VCBeat that the functional prototype of inticare has been successfully developed in the laboratory and is currently undergoing debugging, with a planned market launch in the first quarter of next year. Regarding sales channels, Chen Yuanfei summarized that the company will leverage hellofit’s existing channels, including partnerships with multiple hospitals, offline pharmacies, health supplement retailers, and sports-related outlets.

In addition, from August this year through the next three months, Daxiang Medical plans to complete a financing round of RMB 15–20 million. Sales in 2016 are projected to reach RMB 60 million, with a market share of 20%.

Editor: Bu Yan

Investors interested in Daxiang Medical are welcome to contact Yan Jingjing, Senior Project Manager at VCBeat. Her WeChat ID is 277610925. Feel free to reach out for inquiries and discussions!

 VCBeat’s Series on Cardiovascular Startup Projects

[Cardiovascular Series Report 1] Dongfang Taihua: Making Professional Medical Equipment Accessible to the General Public

[Cardiovascular Series Report 2] Beijing Yitakang: Services Are More Competitive Than Hardware

[Cardiovascular Series Report 3] Health Cloud Alarm: Enabling Children to Intervene in Their Parents’ Chronic Disease Management

[Cardiovascular Series Report 4] 37°C Band: Beyond Sleep and Step Counting, It Monitors Blood Pressure and Heart Rate

[Cardiovascular Series Report 5] Fengtuo Bio: All You Need Is a Suitcase to Get a Checkup at Home

[Cardiovascular Series Report 6] FT-Health: Creating a Personal Physician for the Average Person

[Cardiovascular Series Report 7] Weixin Baiyuan: Entering Chronic Disease Management via ECG Monitoring Devices