Sunfox Deploys 60,000 Portable Spandan ECG Devices Across 20,000 Villages, Screening 5 Million

A silent cardiac arrest killed his closest friend in hours. Rajat Jain was only 21, working as a mechanical engineer in the automotive sector, when that sudden loss upended his trajectory. He could not stop his friend's death. But the tragedy pushed him to build an affordable, pocket-sized electrocardiogram unit capable of flagging cardiac distress miles before a patient ever reaches an intensive care unit.

Today, that impulse has reached the edges of India's rural medical map. Jain's Dehradun-based healthtech venture, Sunfox Technologies, has deployed more than 60,000 units of its portable ECG device, dubbed Spandan, across 28 states. The hardware operates in over 20,000 villages, having screened roughly five million people and directly saving more than two lakh lives through rapid, early intervention.

From Personal Grief to a Five-Engineer Workshop

Chest pain often deceives. In remote valleys and farming belts where district hospitals sit dozens of kilometres away, rural patients routinely dismiss crushing heart attack symptoms as harmless gastric distress. By the time they secure transport across broken roads to reach an ECG machine, the cardiac muscle has suffered permanent damage.

Jain refused to accept that fatal diagnostic gap. In 2016, he teamed up with co-founders Arpit Jain, Saurabh Badola, Nitin Chandola, and Sabit Rawat in Dehradun to launch Sunfox Technologies. The team spent months building prototypes out of their own pockets. Skeptics doubted that an Indian startup could match the diagnostic precision of bulky, multi-lakh-rupee hospital consoles. By 2017, the team assembled their first functioning device, proving that cardiac screening could shrink to the size of a matchbox.

Engineering a Battery-Free 12-Lead Diagnostic Machine

Spandan functions as a full 12-lead ECG monitor. Patients connect to the hardware via standard chest and limb electrodes, while the unit plugs straight into an ordinary smartphone. Proprietary algorithms and analytical software read the heart's electrical currents, generating a clinical report in about two minutes.

Lack of electricity kills medical gear in rural clinics. Spandan bypasses that hurdle entirely. The device houses no internal battery, pulling its tiny operational charge directly from the connected smartphone. It requires zero active internet connection to evaluate waveforms, allowing frontline health workers to screen patients inside deep ravines, remote farmsteads, or windowless clinics. Retail pricing runs from ₹6,900 for entry units up to ₹75,000 for advanced clinical editions.

Clinical Trials and High-Altitude Pilgrimage Deployments

Rigorous medical scrutiny validated the hardware. Between 2018 and 2019, Sunfox ran an initial clinical pilot at Fortis Hospital in Uttarakhand alongside the SELCO Foundation. A formal validation study followed in 2021 at Fortis Escorts Hospital in Dehradun, bench-testing Spandan directly against conventional hospital-grade ECG consoles. Doctors evaluated 153 patients, logging 110 clean comparisons; Spandan’s automated diagnostic match aligned with standard hospital readings in 108 of those 110 cases.

Larger international trials cemented its standing. In 2025, the Anatolian Journal of Cardiology published peer-reviewed research analyzing Spandan across 2,799 patients. To date, Sunfox has completed more than 30 clinical validation studies covering over 30,000 patients.

High-altitude field operations proved its real-world durability. In July 2022, Sunfox teamed up with the Uttarakhand government to launch an emergency cardiac screening station at Sonprayag, the base camp for the Kedarnath pilgrimage trek. Trained local volunteers screened nearly 1,500 pilgrims during the first month alone, instantly flagging acute abnormalities and referring 59 high-risk travelers to attending physicians before they began the grueling mountain ascent.

Sunfox is now scaling its manufacturing pipeline in Uttarakhand to supply community health workers, border outpost clinics, and primary health networks across eastern and southern states, widening its screening safety net for millions who remain miles from the nearest emergency room.