A few years ago, one of Mark Kendall’s relatives was rushed to the hospital in the midst of a heart attack. “I arrived at the hospital as the first family member to attend and was just astonished about the way it was being dealt with,” the scientist and entrepreneur says. “There was no information. I just sat there and thought, ‘There’s got to be so many better ways of doing this.’”
Kendall has a record of pioneering solutions to treat medical problems. In 2012, Kendall won a Rolex Award for Enterprise for his work on the Nanopatch, a plaster-like device covered in thousands of micro-projections (like tiny needles) to deliver vaccinations without breaking the skin. Unlike traditional vial-and-needle vaccinations, the Nanopatch uses dried vaccine powder as a delivery method, and so does not require refrigeration, which is lacking in much of the low-resource regions. “What tends to happen—and still is happening—is that it becomes a separator for the regions that don't have access to refrigeration, so they're not getting access to effective vaccines,” Kendall says.
Support from the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative enabled the Australian scientist to test his highly effective and pain-free vaccination patch under rugged conditions in rural Papua New Guinea. The results led to backing from organizations such as the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and helped Kendall to commercialize the Nanopatch, which is now in clinical trials for numerous vaccinations, with the hope to go into widespread production before the end of the decade.
But after he watched his family member being treated for what turned out to be two heart attacks, Kendall decided to use his biomedical expertise to work on a solution: a patch that can detect diseases as they develop.
Wearable healthcare devices have expanded swiftly over the last decade—from consumer heart-rate monitors to continuous measurement devices that can track markers such as blood glucose, which is useful for conditions like diabetes. “They are out there changing the lives of people with type 1 diabetes. They’ve been used more than 3 million times and are a complete game changer for people,” Kendall says. “But they’re limited to glucose, and they often have a massive needle within them in the order of about 10-mm long.”
Kendall’s solution was to develop a wearable sticker-like sensor that can access bio-signals in the skin without the need for injection or puncture wounds. “The patch has only about 20 micro-electrodes of projections on it,” Kendall explains. “We gain access to biomarkers just a hair’s width within the skin, using very fine structures—much smaller, actually, than what we’ve got with the Nanopatch technology. And those micro-electrodes reach into the skin’s outer layer and gain access to signals that today’s wearables are unable to reach.”
When you have a heart attack, the damaged muscle tissue releases the protein troponin. In a hospital, doctors typically test for troponin to confirm that a heart attack has occurred. “There are 30 million deaths per year from cardiovascular disease, and heart attacks are a good slice of those,” Kendall says. “But if you’re having a heart attack and you’re waiting for hours to get an answer on whether it's happening, that’s wasted time where you could be getting treatment.” Kendall’s sensor could monitor troponin in real time and warn patients as cardiac events first occur. “Just a little bit of notice could open up a really simple treatment. It could be as simple as taking an aspirin to avert it.”
Before pivoting to medicine, Kendall started his career as a rocket scientist, and as an inventor has racked up 150 patents to his name. In 2018, he founded a biomedical startup, WearOptimo, to develop the technology. While further study on using the device to detect cardiovascular events is underway, Kendall is for now interested in a lower-hanging fruit: hydration. “It’s a massive, massive problem,” Kendall says. “You think of a child going to the hospital with [acute] dehydration. The first thing they do is give them a drip and fluids, but they have no idea of what the person’s level of hydration is at all. There’s no way of measuring that. There are some Victorian-era approaches—pinch tests, seeing what your skin looks like, asking what color someone’s pee is. That’s as far as it goes.”
For young children, the elderly, and many medical patients, dehydration can be an extremely dangerous condition. But even for otherwise healthy people, its effects are under-appreciated. “If you’re only 3 percent dehydrated, which is not a big number, the effect on your brain function is equivalent to being over the blood alcohol limit,” Kendall says.
WearOptimo’s hydration measurement sensor has uses beyond the medical sector, such as professional sport, for example. “Another thing [winning] the Rolex Award also did open up was relationships that I could never have imagined, like working with the Formula One champion Mark Webber,” Kendall says. Webber came on board as a strategic partner in setting up an extreme lab environment to test the technology. “Super elite athletes are the most motivated people with hydration for maintaining performance,” Kendall says.
The Rolex Awards are part of the brand’s Perpetual Planet Initiative. Together with partners like Kendall, Rolex seeks to preserve the Earth’s ecosystems and human well-being by advancing humanity’s known boundaries in exploration, science, and technology.
Advances in sensor technology and large-scale artificial intelligence models mean that right now, medical wearables are accelerating at an unprecedented pace. “There’s stuff we’re doing in my company that wouldn’t have even been possible in human history just three years ago,” he says. Ultimately, Kendall’s hope is that WearOptimo’s technology—and the Nanopatch—will be part of a fundamental shift in medicine, from trying to treat our health problems to preventing them in the first place. “The next generation of wearables will be about getting access to all manner of signals to give us real time feedback of what our body is actually doing, to allow us to make early interventions before we even get sick.”
To find out more about Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative, visit rolex.org, and explore our Planet Pioneers partnership page here.
