From digital nutritionists to joined-up DNA databases, seven startups shaping the future of healthcare pitched their businesses to a panel of judges at this year’s WIRED Health event in London. Want to know how healthcare will be changing in the coming years? These are the companies to watch.
Year founded: 2016 Location: London, UK
There is a surprising amount of guesswork in even the most delicate of surgeries – particularly when it comes to inserting stents into blood vessels to help regulate blood flow. “There is currently no objective way to choose the best stent for a patient, and decisions are largely made by sight,” says Katerina Spranger, founder of Oxford Heartbeat, a problem that costs the NHS half a billion pounds every year in corrective surgery. To try and solve this, Spranger has developed software that turns conventional 2D medical scans into 3D models of a patient’s cranial blood vessels, and lets surgeons virtually test different types of stents to see which one would be the best fit. Spranger hopes that this technology will mean fewer wasted stents and unnecessary operations.
Year founded: 2013 Location: London, UK
Something is broken with the way we think about, and pay for, healthcare. Hospitals are great at delivering care and fixing things when they go wrong, but Juliana Bersani wants to help them take a step beyond that. “We’re paying for people to get sick, and we’re not paying for people to get well,” she says. With her startup, Outcomes Based Healthcare, Bersani wants to make it easier for healthcare providers measure the quality of life of their patients by combining healthcare data with information from wearables and other sources. Her platform, which is being tested by clinical commissioning groups and pharmaceutical companies, crunches all this data to give some clear indicators of how a particular medical intervention changes an individual’s life.
Year founded: 2017 Location: Cambridge, UK
Thanks to the falling price of DNA sequencing technology, we’ve sequenced about five million human genomes globally. But very little of this data is joined-up. “It’s all incredibly siloed,” says Patrick Short co-founder of Heterogeneous, a startup that pools genome sequences and lets people own their genetic data. Short is building the back-end for what he calls a “monolithic mountain” of genome data, owned by the individuals and open for researchers to use in their own studies. “We give individuals full control of their data and we allow multiple people to plug in,” he says.
Year founded: 2017 Location: London, UK
Lysa is an app-based virtual nutritionist that helps people track changes in their diet and provides guidance around food decisions. ”Trying to eat healthy sucks,” says Lysa Health co-founder Anne-Laure Le Cunff, so she collaborated with nutritionists to build a conversational assistant that helped people make better food decisions. You can message Lysa what you had for breakfast, and the app will add that to a food diary, or it can use your personalised profile to recommend the best option from a restaurant menu. Le Cunff launched a beta version of the app in November 2017, and is hoping that the system could eventually be used by companies to help manage employee health, or for by insurance companies.
Year founded: 2014 Location: Porto, Portugal
SWORD Health founder Virgilio Bento wants to digitise physical therapy. At the moment, most physical rehabilitation is delivered by therapists on a one-to-one basis, but it’s just not possible to get that treatment to everyone that needs it, Bento says. “We’re not able to pay for that many hours of physical therapy, so we’re cutting back on the time with therapists.” To help overcome that gap, Bento has created a digital therapist that delivers tailored routines to people in their own homes, and tracks their progress using a range of wearable motion sensors. In trials, the system helped 93 per cent of patients improve their motor performance, and in some exercises even beat one-on-one therapy.
Year founded: 2015 Location: London, UK
There are plenty of apps aimed at improving the mental health of adults, but many of them don’t have a separate product for young people, says Bounce Works co-founder Louis Weinstock. “Are those apps designed with the well-being of young people in mind? I’m not so sure.” Weinstock is developing a game that lets children develop qualities like compassion, emotional awareness, patience and courage, that will help equip them to deal with a range of emotions they will experience in their lives. It’ll also allow young people to connect with each other offline and build their own support community.
Year founded: 2015 Location: London, UK
Botsandus creates robots that can learn from the environment around them. Its first creation is Bo, a social robot that can be used as an intelligent assistant in the hospitality and retail industries. But the company also trialled a Bo robot as a companion for James, who has a rare skin condition that makes leaving the house very difficult. “We realised that we could give James a machine like Bo to keep him company,” says Peter Trainor, a behavioural designer who works with Botsandus. Future versions of Bo could help deliver care and monitor patients in their own homes.
Year founded: 2014 Location: Stockholm, Sweden
KRY helps connect doctors with patients through their smartphones, saving doctors time and patients a trip to the GP’s surgery. Users enter in their symptoms, answer a few questions and can then select a doctor who then calls them back over video. After launching in Sweden in 2016, KRY, which means ‘fit and healthy’ in Swedish, now provides nearly two per cent of all GP visits in Sweden. Eventually, says Luke Buhl-Nielsen at Index Ventures, a venture capital firm with a stake in the app, 90 per cent of primary care could shift online altogether.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
