How Belgian start-ups and scale-ups are fighting the COVID-19 battle, part 1/2
By launching triage tools, developing at-home monitoring modules and capturing lots and lots of data.
The current COVID-19 pandemic brings with it distress and despair, but it’s incredible to witness the breath of initiatives being set up to defeat the virus — and its devastating effects — in record time. The virus has pushed every country to show a level of tenacity never seen before. Our Belgian start-ups and scale-ups have revealed their resilience and showed incredible perseverance. And even though we have a long way ahead of us, hats off for what they’ve all accomplished so far. Ready for a bunch of corona-related initiatives from our entrepreneurial community? This is the first of two parts, so bear with me.
It all starts with tracking, tracing and triaging
Many people are anxious, and given that the coronavirus breakout coincided with the flu season, they’re confused as to whether they’re dealing with a corona infection or the regular flu. Bingli has therefore developed a COVID-19 pre-triage chatbot module to help decide whether patients should see a doctor or not, which helps decrease the load primary care providers and emergency departments face. And together with Adun.io and Gaga, Bingli has put its medical triage knowledge to good use by building the Flattening The Curve app, which is meant to map out the evolution of the virus to help governments and hospitals manage the pandemic. Andaman7 has built a free in-app Pandemic Module into their Personal Health Record to inform patients with trusted sources, triage them to reduce the burden on our healthcare infrastructure and collect data for medical research. BeWell has even built self-test kiosks that are currently deployed at the Ghent Univerity Hopsital, to screen for covid-19 infections based on questionnaires and vital signs. They have released a free app and website to enable the same type of screening at home. And also moveUP has developed a government-approved application for triage and continuous monitoring of patients that are potentially affected with COVID-19.
To facilitate appropriate patient flows, Awell has released a free digital pathway to help coordinate the protocols and the flows between care providers, health systems and citizens. At the same time, Umbi has built a digital No-Touch Patient Flow, with which they provide integrated solutions ranging from automated registration upon patient arrival to cashless payment on exit. Sensinxs has implemented a bluetooth technology solution to track beds and personnel in hospital COVID-19 units to avoid contamination and reduce the spread of the virus across different hospital units. And Pixelvision leverages its computer vision technology to detect fever through thermal cameras, so groups of individuals could be screened and potentially warned.
At-home monitoring defines the new normal
When patients are diagnosed with a COVID-19 infection, it’s critical to properly monitor their status. Byteflies can track sleep, motion, gate and cardiac parameters with the help of their proprietary wearable health platform, all while the patient is staying safely at home. And together with other Belgian companies such as Melexis, Televic and Z-Plus, they’ve developed a smart patch that continuously measures corona patients’ breathing patterns, heart rate and temperature during their hospital stay, so that nursing personnel isn’t required to do multiple daily measurements themselves. And after hospital discharge, COVID-19 patients can share their symptoms through the moveUP app while healthcare professionals can consult an overview of all their patients in a medical dashboard.
But it’s not just about monitoring COVID-19 patients. It’s crucially important to do the same for patients with other — now neglected — conditions. And that’s why a ton of start-ups and scale-ups have implemented dashboards, developed sensors and built telehealth features into their existing solutions.
Icometrix has launced a patient web and mobile application that allows remote monitoring of patients with neurological conditions, such as multiple sclerosis. Epihunter helps monitor people with (suspected) absence epilepsy with their wearable and smartphone app by making objective EEG and seizure data available via its neurologist reports. And Helpilepsy ensures continuity of care for epilepsy patients by enabling remote monitoring through their physician dashboards and video consultation modules. FibriCheck has developed TeleCheck to monitor patients with (suspected) atrial fibrillation at home, by allowing them to measure their heart rhythm and heart rate for 7 days before a scheduled teleconsultation. They’re already live in 27 centers across 10 countries in Europe after launching only four weeks ago. Syndo Health is another cardio health app that monitors your health situation remotely, and notifies you when you need to take your medication and connects you with a health coach if necessary. TelePHON.digital enables remote monitoring, training, edutation, coaching and videoconsultations with its all-in-one web tool for speech therapy. Esperity allows cancer patients to follow-up their therapy online during COVID-19 times with the use of a simple symptom dashboard. PatientManager provides similar features for midwives, and Minze Health enables urologists to consult and monitor their patients remotely through their clinical portal.
Data, data and more data
Belgium is home to several big data start-ups and scale-ups, many of which have joined forces to enable incredible insights into the current corona crisis.
Robovision — together with many European partners — has launched their Imaging COVID-19 AI initiative to train their AI models to detect COVID-19 in lung scans, enabling radiologists to work more efficiently and supplying researchers with relevant imaging data to help in the fight against corona. The aim of the project is to automate the diagnosis of COVID-19 on CT scans, and to quantify disease burden in the lungs of infected patients. And also Icometrix is working with multiple universities and European partners to perfect their icovid solution, another AI application that allows quantitative analysis of thorax CT scans.
UgenTec’s AI-powered data analysis tool for laboratories made it possible to speed up the results of DNA-based COVID-19 tests by 30 (!) times. Together with the Flemish biotech company Biogazelle and several other Belgian partners, they’ve designed a method to automate these tests to drastically ramp up test capacities throughout our country. DNAlytics supports the Crisis Management Group from Belgian authorities by monitoring the pandemic through the analysis of hospital capacities. And based on the open data communicated daily by Sciensano, combined with population datasets, they’ve constructed a public outbreak overview map that shows the contamination rates down to the municipality level. Also Savics enables a real-time dashboard that provides a national, regional and provincial overview of COVID-19 data through their custom software module for laboratories that capture COVID-19 test results.
Ontoforce’s software is capable of aggregating, transforming and orchestrating data from multiple data silos , and they’ve just launched their COVID-19 solution with which users can explore information from more than 150 sources and 335 million datapoints: everything from full-text scholarly articles, clinical studies and COVID-19 related IP documents, all linked with relevant diseases and health conditions, genes and phenotypes, drugs, chemicals, active substances and much more. And they’ve made their platform freely available for 3 months. Lynxcare, another big data scale-up, is building a granular longitudonal COVID-19 registry, mining COVID-19 related patient data to help hospitals gain insights from their infected patients. Their dataset includes over 150 different clinical parameters, going from lab results to comorbidities, outcomes and CT findings.
Alexandria.Works supports all the COVID-19 research efforts with their free information discovery tool that returns relevant document snippets related to corona queries. Cumul.io keeps everyone informed on the spread of the coronavirus with their COVID-19 dashboard. EisphorIA has deployed its NLP-solution and now allows researchers to navigate in thousands of COVID-19 related scientific papers. It helps them to find insights, identify trends and quickly apprehend critical contents, while working in a collaborative environment. And IP Metro tries to battle fake information on COVID-19 with their online monitoring technologies in order to guide internet users to verified content and genuine products.
Each of these start-ups, scale-ups and more established organisations have shifted their focus to contribute to the COVID-19 battle. And it’s incredible to see many of these efforts being realised collectively. But this is by no means an exhaustive list. There are a bunch more initiatives, so I’ll post part 2 — about how non-medical start-ups meet the current needs of our healthcare industry, how 3D printing companies contribute by building the necessary equipment and how start-ups are protecting people’s mental and physical wellbeing in these tough times — at the beginning of next week.
