Mabu: a medication robot paid for by drug makers and health systems

A home robot the patient never paid for

Mabu was made by Catalia Health, a San Francisco company founded in 2014 by Cory Kidd, who earned his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. It had a small yellow body with large eyes and a tablet mounted in the body. The robot helped patients keep up with their medication and track their symptoms, and the information went to clinicians. Patients paid nothing. Drug makers and health systems paid per patient per month.

It began with 40 Kaiser Permanente heart failure patients

Khosla Ventures invested $1.25 million in 2015, and total funding reached about $7.75–8 million by 2017 (sources differ). The first production run of 500 units was planned in China. Kaiser Permanente paid for Mabu to go to heart failure patients, starting with an initial group of 40 users. Besides heart failure, the conditions it targeted included rheumatoid arthritis and kidney disease. In 2018 Catalia joined an American Heart Association innovators network, and in September 2019 it announced a 12-month pilot with Pfizer.

Patients who would not give the robots back

The company told a reporter that Kaiser users were 84% more likely to track their symptoms. That figure did not come from a peer-reviewed study. During his PhD, Kidd ran a randomized trial at Boston University Medical Center in which a robot coach did better than a computer at supporting adherence. Looking back on the early studies, he said: “The biggest challenge with the early studies was that, in the end, the patients didn’t want to give the robots back.” In November 2024 the Boston Globe reported that the company had shut down earlier that year.

The payer and the person living with it

Catalia Health did not sell Mabu to patients. It sold it as a service to drug makers and health systems. Patients got the robot at no cost. Whether it stayed in their homes depended on the paying organisations and on the company staying in business.

When the one who pays for a robot is not the one who lives with it, whose satisfaction do you design for?

What we haven’t confirmed

• How many Mabu robots were deployed and how many patients used them
• Why the company closed, and what happened to the robots and patient data afterwards (no company statement found)
• When the first deployment happened (sources say 2018 or 2019)
• Whether the kidney condition was late-stage kidney disease or kidney cancer (sources differ)