Studio Rebus, a Croatian startup company founded by Tihana Petričević, a Graduate of the Zagreb Founder Institute, recently won the prestigious Startup Europe Award for best new health startup for their latest project Meridda. The event, organized by the European Commission as a part of their Startup Initiative, is just the first step for Studio Rebus. As a result of their win in November, Studio Rebus will be going to another, larger installment of the Startup Europe Awards in Brussels sometime in 2017. The event in Brussels is the largest startup event in the entire world.
We are honoured to be part of this competition and to present our project to the jury and the wider audience. The presentation of Meridda in Brussels is a big responsibility for us, but also an honour to have the opportunity to represent Croatia with innovations in the field of health and medicine”- Tihana Petričević
Besides winning a Europe Startup Award, Meridda has also been recognized as one of the top 500 startups in Europe by the Pioneers Festival in Vienna, the Pirate Summit, Pioneers of the Balkans, and the Balkan Venture Forum competitions. So for those who don't know, what does Meridda do?
Meridda, by Studio Rebus, is an application with corresponding wearable technology, a smart bracelet, that identifies and offers remediation solutions for the negative effects of stress in your life. The smart bracelet and the application on the phone measures a user's stress levels using sensors and user input data. Based on all of the data that the application collects it analyzes a user's levels of stress. The application creates a unique profile for every user with unique solutions to mediate the stress in one's life. User's can make their profiles even more in-depth by sharing any medical conditions etc, that they may have. The more thorough that a user's profile becomes the more unique the stress-relieving activities, foods, and relaxation techniques the application suggests become.
Currently the application is only in the functional prototype beta phase. Less than 25 people have ever tried Meridda, and only around 600 total hours of operation have been logged on the app. Despite this, the application continues to win and succeed at multiple high-profile startup competitions. The reason is, there has never been a better time to be innovating in the wearable technology field. Wearable technology only continues to get more and more popular each successive year especially when it comes to technologies and applications that measure or deal with a user's health.
Meridda is in a great position because there are not that many stress related applications available currently. There are a few, but user reports tend to agree that they are not very effective. There is a wide-open field for Meridda to succeed in, and since their app solely focuses on stress and nothing else they should be able to garner a nice amount of users when the app goes live.
At this point in time, Meridda is only compatible with iOS and Android operating systems, but since these two operating systems are far and away the two most popular on the market this shouldn't slow Studio Rebus down in the slightest.
The goal of Studio Rebus is to make people more aware of life's daily stresses and the effects that this stress has on the brain and a person's overall health. They not only seek to educate people on stress and the related healthcare issues, but they also aim to provide people with adequate solutions in dealing with these stresses and feeling better.
The Meridda project is less than two-years old and they have already accomplished so much. Look for Studio Rebus and the Meridda project at the 2017 Europe Startup Awards in Brussels!
