Interview
In conversation with
Ruben de Francisco
Ruben de Francisco is rethinking sleep diagnostics with Onera Health by taking the gold-standard polysomnography out of the lab and into the home—at clinical grade. Instead of selling hardware, Onera delivers complete sleep tests wherever patients are via a self-applied, medical-grade patch system tied to a cloud platform with AI-enabled analysis, so providers avoid capex and get to answers faster. The conviction behind it is pragmatic: innovation scales only when product excellence meets business-model fit and real clinical workflows.
Any procedure that doesn’t need to be inside the hospital should be moved out closer to the patient, or even to the patient’s home—distributing it, making it scalable, and automating as much as we can.
A Johns Hopkins visit crystallized the problem: lab-based PSG is uncomfortable for patients, expensive for systems, and slow to access. De Francisco’s answer combines engineering and operating discipline—an end-to-end service built around a self-applied, medical-grade patch; a cloud platform with AI-supported analysis and reporting; and a commercial model that delivers tests, not devices, so providers launch without capital expenditure and maintain consistent quality across settings. The principle travels: move procedures closer to people, integrate into clinicians’ workflows, and design for evidence generation that shortens time to therapy. Adoption, he argues, hinges on reimbursement clarity, interoperability, and outcomes that matter to both patients and professionals. The broader appeal to leaders and policymakers is steady and ambitious: focus on human-centric, scalable models; harmonize regulation and data standards; and treat collaboration as the only credible path to healthcare that keeps pace with aging populations and chronic disease.
Lessons from Home PSG at Scale:
Quality Without Friction
What we cover
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How Onera shifts gold-standard PSG from lab to home without sacrificing clinical quality
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Why delivering tests—not hardware removes capex and speeds provider adoption
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How a self-applied patch and AI-enabled cloud analysis reduce operational burden and time to treatment
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Where reimbursement, workflow integration, and interoperability decide adoption at scale
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Which policy moves—harmonized regulation and data standards—could accelerate access globally
Ruben is founder and CEO of Onera Health, where he focuses on making remote diagnostics and monitoring accessible to all. He has over 15 years of experience leading organizations in the development and commercialization of medical and digital health products. At imec, he led a multidisciplinary team of talented engineers and researchers tasked with developing advanced wearable technologies for consumer and medical health applications, and worked on projects for Samsung, Philips, Nihon Kohden, and Bio-Telemetry, among others. Ruben holds a PhD in Signal Processing from École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in France, and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnical University of Catalonia.
About
Ruben de Francisco
