There are millions of Kinsa thermometers in use and the company says it receives 100,000 temperature readings per day.Kinsa's smart thermometer provides data on where illness is spreading.The company's data can be used to tell retailers and brands where medicine will be in high demand.in the last few years, but few instances are more vexing than showing up to the drugstore stuffed up and feverish only to find an empty space where the cold medicine should be.
"I wanted to create a system that enabled early warning and forecasting," Inder Singh, founder of smart thermometer startup Kinsa, told Insider."The obvious use cases are, where do I put the product?". Now the company is helping to direct inventory management for major brands like Johnson & Johnson and Mucinex, as well as an unnamed retailer.
The device works in tandem with what Singh calls a"triage" or"nurse in your pocket" app, launched in 2019, which asks about symptoms and the user's household to offer advice and keep a record that they can share with their doctors.And for retailers, Kinsa can predict which types of medicines will need to be in stock in the next week or two as waves of cold and flu come through the local area.
Oftentimes, what looks like a shortage to a consumer — an empty store shelf — is really poor inventory management. The product just isn't in the right place. That's where granular demand forecasting comes in.