Sproutel is now Empath Labs!

Back when Sproutel was founded in 2012, our mission was to reach every child with type 1 diabetes through our first product, Jerry the Bear, and create similar products for children with other illnesses. We knew that this wouldn’t happen overnight. So, we built slowly and intentionally with a goal of doing well by doing good.

Since then we’ve reached over 125,000 children with type 1 diabetes, cancer, sickle cell disease, and anxiety. We are proud to work with partners like Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), Aflac, and a network of over 450 hospitals to provide products that humanize and improve healthcare for children and their families. And, we’ve seen the immense impact of these tools to provide comfort and joy to children while improving psychosocial outcomes within the family.

Through our work over the past 10 years, there are two key superpowers that we honed:

  1. Engaging patients with technology to provide emotional support and drive behavior change
  2. Refining a patient-centered, empathy-driven design process that powers the development of new innovations

These superpowers uncovered a new opportunity to accelerate pediatric drug development. We applied our interactive companions and design process to recruit, retain, and engage pediatric patients in clinical trials. Our Clinical Companions Platform builds upon all of our past work, enabling the creation of custom companions for children that mirror their disease and experience in a clinical trial. And we did all of this at a speed that we could have never dreamed of when we initially founded the company.

As we look to the future, we see a very different company than the one we founded in 2012. We see the opportunity to grow our impact on a transformative scale, and to tackle even greater challenges in healthcare. Creating solutions that improve the consent and assent process for families, emotionally engage patients in their disease management, and bring a patient-centered view throughout the continuity of care.

Our new name, Empath Labs, embodies these goals. We look forward to creating a world where healthcare is more human(e).