Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and costs the French healthcare system an estimated €21 billion a year. Cardiac rehabilitation after an acute event is proven to reduce mortality and rehospitalisation, but access remains limited and follow-up is difficult to sustain.
Ensweet builds cardiac tele-rehabilitation solutions that bring structured, evidence-based exercise therapy into patients’ homes. The company recently published the largest national clinical study on cardiac tele-rehabilitation in France.
Fabien Watrelot is Ensweet’s founder and CEO. He trained as an engineer before moving into digital health, and his interest in exercise as medicine started with his own experience managing asthma through physical activity. We spoke about prevention, why technology should be a means to an end, and building solutions that hold up to clinical scrutiny.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role?
I am Fabien Watrelot, the founder and CEO of Ensweet, a company specialising in cardiac tele-rehabilitation. I trained as an engineer, before moving into digital health after further training in connected health. Working alongside healthcare professionals, I develop solutions aimed at improving access to rehabilitation care and make it easier to monitor patients at home. My work more broadly focuses on transforming care pathways through digital tools and on rolling out organisational innovation in healthcare.
How did your company come about and what was the motivation behind it?
My own health story is where this really started. I’ve been asthmatic since childhood, and at one point a doctor suggested I take up regular physical activity to help manage it. It made a real difference — my asthma improved significantly, and I came out of that experience with a genuine love for physical exercise that’s stayed with me ever since.
That personal turning point shaped how I think about medicine: exercise isn’t just a “nice to have,” it’s a legitimate, medically validated therapy — but one that’s often underused because it’s hard to access, structure, and follow up on properly. That’s the problem I set out to solve. With Ensweet, we’re making exercise-based therapy — starting with cardiac rehabilitation — more accessible and rigorously grounded in medical evidence, so patients can benefit the way I did, but in a structured, monitored way at home.
Can you describe your company’s mission and values?
Our Vision for 2035: To be the first European healthcare ecosystem 100% driven by prevention, validated by clinical evidence, and governed by healthcare economics.
We’re building toward that ecosystem through four pillars:
- Ensweet Hospital — optimising in-hospital rehabilitation care, starting in cardiology, extending to pulmonology and beyond.
- Ensweet Therapeutic — solutions that directly treat patients and close gaps in care.
- Ensweet CRO — clinical studies conducted on behalf of pharmaceutical partners.
- Ensweet Insurance — coverage designed for people who genuinely engage in preventive care.
By 2035, Ensweet aims to become the reference in health prevention, enabling every individual to become an active participant in their own health, every healthcare professional to better anticipate patient risk rather than simply react to it, and payers to achieve lasting cost reductions.
Our Values
- People and the field, first — employees, patients, clinicians, and partners sit at the center of every decision. Money is necessary to our mission, never its purpose.
- Trust and transparency — trust is given upfront and sustained through honest reporting, open dialogue, and the willingness to say what needs saying.
- Responsibility and rigor — healthcare demands a high bar for what we ship, how fast we respond to problems, and how well we honour our commitments.
- Entrepreneurial spirit and performance — we test, learn, and improve continuously, grounded in a culture of evidence and measurable impact.
What are some of the most pressing social issues that your company is working to address through its technology?
Healthcare systems were historically built to respond to emergencies and acute illness — treating a patient once something happens. Today they face a different challenge: the rise of chronic disease, which demands long-term follow-up and sustained patient engagement.
Prevention has become central to addressing this — but “classic” prevention (mass vaccination, standardised interventions targeting single risk factors) is built for population-scale reach, not for the sustained, personalised support that chronic conditions actually require. That gap — between prevention, treatment, and long-term care — is where Ensweet operates.
We chose to focus on cardiovascular disease: the leading cause of death worldwide, the second-leading cause of death in France (the first among women), and a cost estimated at €21 billion a year to the French healthcare system. Within cardiovascular prevention, we deliberately started with tertiary prevention — cardiac rehabilitation after an acute event — because it offers strong clinical evidence of reduced mortality and rehospitalisation, highly structured and reproducible care protocols, and a real, near-term opportunity for digitisation.
That is where Ensweet Cardio was born: cardiovascular rehabilitation in post-acute care as our clinical, operational, and economic foundation — the base from which we expand into other levels of prevention.
How does your company measure the impact of its work in creating positive change?
Impact for us isn’t a marketing claim — it has to hold up to clinical scrutiny. That’s core to how we operate: everything we do is grounded in evidence, and we invest directly in generating that evidence ourselves rather than relying on secondhand data.
We recently published the largest national clinical study on cardiac tele-rehabilitation in France, which lets us measure real outcomes — not just engagement metrics — across a much larger patient population than anything previously available in this field. That gives us hard data on things like patient adherence, clinical outcomes, and reduction in rehospitalisation, which is ultimately what determines whether a solution like ours actually changes patients’ lives, not just whether they use the app.
Beyond the study itself, we track impact continuously: every patient generates real-world health data through our platform, which lets us monitor outcomes at scale, refine our protocols, and build the kind of evidence base that convinces clinicians, payers, and regulators — not just users.
In your opinion, what impact will technology have in creating a better future?
I think technology’s biggest contribution will be shifting how we measure and reward value in healthcare. Today, most systems still pay for medical time — a consultation, a procedure, an act — rather than for actual health outcomes. Technology, especially when it can reliably capture and prove impact through data, makes it possible to move toward a model where we pay for value: real improvements in patients’ health, not just time spent delivering care.
That shift matters because it realigns incentives. It lets clinicians and companies like ours focus on what genuinely improves a patient’s condition, rather than on volume of activity. It’s also, frankly, more sustainable for healthcare systems that are already under financial strain.
But that future isn’t automatic — it depends on one condition: the technology itself has to be built ethically and sustainably. That means being responsible with patient data, transparent about how algorithms make decisions, and mindful of the environmental footprint of the infrastructure behind it. Technology that creates value-based healthcare but does so irresponsibly — extractively with data, or carelessly with resources — isn’t actually progress. So for me, the opportunity and the responsibility go hand in hand.
What advice do you have for other companies looking to use technology for good and create a positive impact in the world?
Start with the problem, not the technology. Before building anything, make sure you can clearly articulate the societal need you’re addressing — and that it’s real, not assumed. It sounds obvious, but a lot of “tech for good” projects skip this step and end up solving a problem nobody actually has, or one that’s already well served.
Once you’re confident the need is real, ask a second, equally important question: is technology actually the best way to solve it? Not every problem needs an app, an algorithm, or a platform. Sometimes a simpler, non-technological solution is more effective, faster to deploy, or more accessible to the people who need it. Technology should be a means to an end, not the starting point — building tech because you can, rather than because it’s genuinely the right tool, is how you end up with solutions that look impressive but don’t move the needle.
If both of those hold up — a real need, and technology as the right answer — then you have a solid foundation to build on. Everything else, from the business model to the go-to-market strategy, is easier to get right once you’re confident you’re actually solving the right problem in the right way.
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Ensweet is expanding beyond cardiac rehabilitation into pulmonology and other areas, with a longer-term vision to build a prevention-first healthcare ecosystem by 2035.
You can find out more at ensweet.fr.
