Hiyd attaches health tracking to the watch you already wear

The device is a small, thin disc designed to sit under a watch without magnets or adhesive. Batroukh told TechCrunch that microsuction is a textured silicone material with hundreds of tiny pockets per square inch. When pressed, the pockets push out air and create a vacuum, similar to traditional suction cups but much smaller. He said the material is 0.3 mm thick in Hiyd's manufacturing process, works well at stopping shear forces, and can be removed with a little prying. That approach, he said, avoids residue and does not interfere with watches that keep time using magnets.

The sensor measures 2.7 mm thick and weighs 7 grams, according to Batroukh. It collects biometrics similar to those of leading wearables, including heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep staging, movement, calories burned, and VO2 max estimations, then syncs to an iOS or Android app. To tune the sensor, Hiyd's team is filming itself doing various activities and labeling the resulting data sets to train its AI.

"We go for a walk and say, 'This is somebody walking, this is somebody jogging, this is somebody running,'" Batroukh told TechCrunch. "The one thing that AI is really good at is data analysis, so we can basically fit a lot of heuristic analysis into our sets really quickly."

Hiyd is also working on nutrition tracking inside its app. The aim is not to count calories but to help users understand how eating habits affect sleep quality or workout performance. Batroukh described feedback that could tell a user that sleeping worse on days when they work out at 10 p.m. instead of 10 a.m., or that a slice of cake before bed may have reduced deep sleep because of sugar.

Batroukh said the company's broader goal is to make health tracking less of a conscious lifestyle change. "We don't think that health tracking needs to be this overly conscious decision where you have to change something about the way you look," he told TechCrunch. "That's the ethos of the entire company. Our plan is to build out this product ecosystem of invisible health tracking."

He spent about seven years as a manufacturing design engineer at Apple. He said he left partly because many products became more about being an Apple product than being something for the customer, and that Hiyd gives him a chance to do the opposite. The startup's co-founders include Omar Shakir, an experienced mechanical engineer who serves as CTO, and Mahamad Charawi, head of software. Charawi previously co-led the Y Combinator-backed startup Laudspeaker through its sale, according to TechCrunch.

Hiyd is presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it is competing in Startup Battlefield as one of the top 20 companies. The company plans to launch a Kickstarter in November. So far, more than 16,000 people have made deposits to secure Hiyd's first units.