An Israeli company announced this week that it has sold a one-third interest in a medical device it developed to a British-Taiwanese company for $370 million – making the total value of SafeSky’s LifeKeeper Patch more than $1 billion. The deal, between SafeSky and Micro-Star International (MSI), is one of the biggest ever in relative terms for an Israeli hi-tech industry. SafeSky will retain 67% of the ownership of the patch, and MSI has an option to purchase a bigger share later on – at five times the price it paid.

The LifeKeeper Patch, not much bigger than a shekel coin, contains a microprocessor which can read information about the wearer’s medical state – recording data such as body temperature, heart rate and rhythms, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels. When the patch is worn, the information is transmitted via Bluetooth to a cell phone, where an application records the information. The phone program evaluates the data, and if the information being recorded indicates that that wearer is in danger of a heart attack or stroke, it can send an emergency message out to doctors or emergency services, who can then locate the wearer using the phone’s GPS capabilities.