Our Entrepreneurial Journey — a gait to better care?
Whilst trying to virtually connect with as many people as possible on LinkedIn during lockdown, I came across a post about a virtual hackathon called ‘Code to Care’, focusing on finding sustainable healthtech solutions which was run by Imperial College Business School. A new chapter in my life had begun. Having worked with Virtual Reality for my undergraduate dissertation, I knew there was something I could bring to this event. During a Zoom speed-dating event during the hackathon, I came across 3 other like-minded individuals who were all interested in using mobile technology to help lessen the burden of the lives of those stricken by Dementia. Our team consisted of myself, Emre Yavuz, an incoming Master’s student on the Translational Neuroscience (MSc) course at Imperial College London, Timothy Chau, a recently graduated medical doctor from King’s College London, Hinal Kumar, a third year medical student at Imperial College London and Karnsiree Chaisrirattanakul, an incoming Master’s student at Imperial College London on the Strategic Marketing (MSc) course. We had decided to focus our idea on creating an app to help predict one’s risk of Dementia and monitor their disease progression, and had just 3 days to make our final pitch as convincing as possible in just 2 minutes. Based on the research suggesting a potential correlation between gait patterns and cognitive decline, we felt that focusing our app on the use of gait analysis would be a fruitful venture. However, our journey turned out not to be as easy as it seemed…
Ideally our app would be able to predict one’s risk of developing Dementia, monitor the progression of the disease, and identify the subtype of the disease, all by passively monitoring the participants gait using an Artificial-Intelligence based algorithm. The data from our app would then be relayed to clinicians who could then use this information. However, this end goal seemed more and more impossible to achieve as time went on. Our first mentorship session was with Clive Flashman, the Director of Strategy for ORCHA Health. Clive’s advice gave us the understanding for who we might have to partner with to make our idea a success, and what they could do to help us. He explained the very real regulatory issues that entrepreneurs face when trying to sell into the NHS and gave us his ideas of how these might be mitigated. He was very supportive both during and after the hackathon process. We then had a mentorship with Ram Rajaraman, an Entrepreneur who is the Founder and CEO of CHAI Analytics, an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) start-up, who advised on making sure we had thought carefully enough about our business marketing strategy and how we were going to gain appropriate investment in our app, things we had barely thought about before the session. Following these sessions, we worked very hard over a period of 24 hours to ensure we had incorporated all of these suggestions into our pitch. After submitting our pitch to the Hackathon team, we waited anxiously for 11 hours for the results. At 12.18am, I received a message saying that we had made it through to the final 5 teams out of a total of 34. I couldn’t believe my eyes. We had just 24 hours to make a now 3-minute pitch flawless if we wanted to have any chance of winning the hackathon…
What was missing from our pitch? Would an investor be convinced given the information we had given them? We had to very carefully rethink our plan forward, clearly outlining the milestones we would need to achieve in order to reach our desired end goal of achieving FDA approval and become a fully diagnostic medical software. This would involve running UK-based pilot studies by partnering with relevant institutions such as Imperial College London’s Dementia Research Institute, developing a minimal viable product to test our app’s accuracy on patients, gathering evidence for the app’s safety which would be fundamental for later regulatory approval, developing and launching our full product to integrated care systems in the UK and then seeking CE-mark certification for our software to allow it to be compatible with existing wearable devices. In the long-term, we would enter the US market where a larger population of Dementia patients and both private and health insurance companies exist, and secondary markets where digital health investments in managing long-term conditions are significant. This process would be bound to take another 10 years. Our levels of self-doubt continued to rise. Additionally, we had to carefully rethink our business model, first approaching private and public health care sectors and large healthcare insurance companies, followed by the individuals who are at high-risk of developing dementia. A total nightmare to put into action…
Following an enormous amount of coffee, the day had finally come, and we had just 2 hours left before giving a live final pitch in front of 16 judges. Shortly before presenting our pitch, we had a final mentorship session with Ben Mumby-Croft, the Director of Entrepreneurship at Imperial College London. Ben told us about how although all the information we needed was in the slides we were using to present our pitch, we needed to reconsider the order in which we presented the information. We had just one hour to ensure our pitch was within 3-minutes and included all the necessary information we wanted, whilst being eye-catching and convincing for the judges. When the time finally came, we were told that we would be the first team to pitch. After an adrenaline-pumping 3-minutes, the worst part of the experience had arrived. Questions. Many of the judges questioned our idea, arguing that we had not discussed how our app would distinguish between those with Dementia and other walking disorders, how it would distinguish leg movements from other movements such as the hands and how those with Dementia would remember to use the app itself. One judge even told us that there was no clear evidence that gait could be used as a biomarker for Dementia disease progression. Had we gone down completely the wrong path? How could our idea have any possible chance of reaching the market? Our chances seemed slim…
However, after having immensely enjoyed the process of bringing together our ideas to prepare a pitch at the Hackathon, we had a sheer determination to continue growing and learning from the experience, and regardless of the outcome, really wanted to learn about the ups and downs as well as the process of developing a Medtech startup. We arranged several Zoom calls with experts in the Medtech field, including Dr. Samir Shah, a Neuropsychiatrist, Entrepreneur and co-founder of the Dorothy App, an app designed to help elderly people with memory problems. Dr. Shah greatly restored our lost hope by mentioning that most tests to assess those with Dementia are psychological pen and paper tests that are not used in predicting one’s risk of Dementia but rather for monitoring their progression. Perhaps there would be a place in the market for an app that could actually predict one’s risk of Dementia rather than simply monitor their progression. However, when we then spoke to Diana Hodgins, the Founder and Technical Director at Dynamic Metric Ltd, we were reminded of the enormous difficulty in designing an app that would specifically be able to detect Dementia-related gait changes as opposed to other diseases affecting gait. All our hope had yet again been lost. However, when researching medtech startups we read about CharcoLtd, a medtech start-up working on a system for people with Parkinson’s to improve their quality of life. Greatly inspired by their work, we immediately contacted their CEO, Lucy Jung, as we were eager to pick her brains. Lucy enthralled us with her description of the honourable journey she had taken to establish CharcoLtd and very kindly put us in touch with Paul Sizaire, the Co-President of Imperial Junior Solutions, a student-run consulting company providing technical services, who told us that they found our plan inspirational, and to Paul Davies, the Director of Hilltop Ltd — an advanced analytics consultancy, who told us he would be happy to help us in any way he could and recommended useful companies who could help us develop a minimal valuable product for our app. However, we then contacted a professor in Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, who said that we would be best helped by recruiting a technology-oriented member onto our team. Despite feeling slightly overwhelmed at the ups and downs of the journey, we were optimistic about our idea, and continued to persevere…
We next signed up for an Ideas Surgery with the Imperial Enterprise lab, a session where we could share our ideas with other keen founders of potential Medtech start-ups who wanted to gain as much advice as they could on developing their idea. Following on from this session, we were told about Imperial Enterprise lab’s monthly ‘Pitch n Mix’ event, where one could pitch their business idea in 60 seconds to get feedback, and immediately signed up. Much to our surprise, we were declared the winning pitch of the night, and also won the prize for the best backdrop during our pitch. It seemed as if our hard work had finally paid off. Following on from our success at this event, Ben Mumby-Croft, who had previously given us a mentorship session at the ‘Code to Care’ Hackathon, said that he could get in touch with members of the Dementia Research Institute at Imperial who could help us develop our idea. Was this the start of a successful venture? Let’s wait and see…
So, what are the key takeaway points?
1. Don’t fool yourself on your product’s value:
- Clearly identify and quantify the value it can bring and exactly who, including both the users and investors will benefit from it.
- Ensure that it is accessible and is of value to the end user. This will require extensive product assessment within the environment you intend to use it in.
2. A diagnostic medical device requires extensive evaluation and regulatory approval that most founders won’t have the time or cash to follow through
3. Working with medical data requires regulatory approved data collection and storage systems
4. Ideas will continually evolve, transform and be superseded. That’s the nature of starting a venture…
Get in touch with Ambulo:
Emre Yavuz
Recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh in Neuroscience and is starting a Master’s at Imperial College London in Translational Neuroscience (MSc), with interests in HeathTech, Research and Entrepreneurship.
Email: emre@talktalk.net
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/emre-yavuz-449216187
Timothy Chau
Recently qualified NHS doctor from King’s College London and a Management graduate from Imperial College London, with interests in HealthTech, Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship.
Email: timothy.chau96@gmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timothy-chau
Hinal Kumar
Year 3 Medical Student studying at Imperial College School of Medicine, with interests in Health Technology, Research and Entrepreneurship.
Email: hinal.kumar@hotmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hinal-kumar-5ab8aa1ab
Karnsiree Chaisrirattanakul
Master’s student in Strategic Marketing at Imperial Business School, with background in Sales, Business Development, and Consulting. Interested in entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and innovative designs.
Email: karnsiree.ch@gmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/karnsireech
