Kang Sung-ji, CEO of Welt, "Real-time and Customized Prescriptions Possible with Smartphone-Linked DTx"

[DTx Era⑦] Expanding from Health Monitoring Belt to Disease Treatment Software
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"The moment a patient is prescribed a digital therapeutic (DTx) and downloads it onto their smartphone, the smartphone becomes a medical device. Next-generation DTx will be able to access all information measurable by the smartphone, such as the patient's sleep and wake times, exercise duration, steps, and heart rate, providing a 360-degree view of the patient and delivering real-time personalized prescriptions."

Kang Seongji, CEO of Welt (photo), graduated from Yonsei University College of Medicine, served as a public health doctor at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, worked at Samsung Electronics, and then founded the healthcare startup Welt. While working in the healthcare division of Samsung Electronics' wireless business unit, he developed a waist belt that detects the user's waist circumference, step count, overeating, calories burned, and blood sugar levels, linking it to a smartphone to commercialize it as a digital healthcare device that helps manage personal health. 'The Era of DTx'

After becoming independent with Welt, he ventured into the DTx field. While the waist belt functions as a medical device that checks and diagnoses health status, DTx provides verified software (applications) to solve users' diseases or health problems based on the measured indicators. Starting with an exercise training app for patients with sarcopenia, Welt has been developing DTx in various fields such as alcohol addiction and eating disorder treatments, achieving the fastest results in insomnia treatment DTx.

Welt’s insomnia DTx, "PILLow Rx," offers patients personalized schedules based on lifestyle data and sleep diaries collected from them. According to the DTx prescription provided via the smartphone app, patients set alarms aligned with their bedtime, and can consult anytime if they have questions. This process, where patients improve their lifestyle and sleep patterns through the app, produces effects beyond those of oral sleeping pills without significant side effects.

PILLow Rx received approval for confirmatory clinical trials verifying safety and efficacy from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety in September last year and has recently completed clinical trials smoothly. Once the final clinical results are out, applying for product approval within this year could earn it the title of "Korea’s first DTx" within the year.

CEO Kang explained, "DTx has the advantage that patients can receive continuous treatment anytime and anywhere without face-to-face consultations with doctors every time. For patients with mild insomnia, using the DTx app alone can expect treatment effects in a short period instead of taking sleeping pills. For patients with severe symptoms, a treatment method combining sleeping pills and DTx initially, then gradually reducing sleeping pill dosage through behavioral correction, is also possible."

As DTx is actually used by patients and more patient information and treatment effects accumulate, treatment methods can be upgraded to be more diverse and sophisticated. CEO Kang predicted, "The next-generation insomnia DTx currently under development collects various digital biomarkers from daily life, and artificial intelligence (AI) analyzes and automatically measures sleep data. In the future, it will be possible to link not only the patient’s digital biometric signals but also hospital data to retrieve medication information and underlying disease data, and to analyze events occurring in daily life, such as the patient’s card usage recognized by the smartphone app, to reflect them in DTx prescriptions."