How Belgian start-ups and scale-ups are fighting the COVID-19 battle, part 2/2
Building ventilators, protecting people’s mental wellbeing and matching volunteering neighbours to help each other when things get tough.
The first part listed a bunch of brand-new COVID-19 triage tools and at-home monitoring solutions, as well as the initiatives of Belgium’s finest big data start-ups and scale-ups. Now we’re diving into a suite of other creative efforts to offset the devastating impact of the coronavirus, all of which are again initiated by our Belgian entrepreneurial community.
Mental and physical wellbeing in times of crisis
Mental distress during — as well as after — the pandemic is a highly relevant issue. That’s why Moonbird is developing a hand-held tool that guides your breathing whenever you’re experiencing stress. Their algorithms calculate your personalised breathing rhythm, and during this difficult period, they’re hosting live webinars each weekday at 6pm where Flemish experts share insights and methods to get your stress under control. At the same time, Health Endeavour and NSX are trying to combat social isolation by developing Zipster: a social prescription platform for patients to receive psychosocial support when necessary. The only thing you’ll need is a social prescription from a doctor.
But what about our most vulnerable population? While our elderly population living in care facilities aren’t allowed to welcome any visitors due to the current health risks, Soulcenter enables real and authentic stories to be harvested to deliver better, warmer and more personal care. Zorabots has already donated 70 robots to residential care facilities to help battle social isolation. Also Noblito helps the isolated elderly, be enabling them to share pictures and messages to family and friends free of charge. And if the technology is too complicated, Beego comes to the rescue with their free digital crisis line that allows isolated people to contact IT students, so they can assist them in setting up digital tools such as Skype and Whatsapp.
But mental wellbeing goes had in hand with its physical counterpart. So that’s why B-Tonic posts daily workouts and healthy food recipes, Move to happiness has moved all their sports classes online, Mums en Bubs has done the same for brand new moms so they can come together virtually and work out with their babies, MoveOut connects their users to coaches while offering high-quality home workouts via livestreaming, ELCIES is putting their algoritms to work to create personalized exercises, and Activ84Health has decided to offer their Memoride solution for free to residential care facilities so that elderly people can virtually cycle through the neighbourhood they grew up in.
When non-medical start-ups meet the needs of our healthcare industry.
Beeple has provided hopsitals with their online staff management and planning software to save time and allow for more efficiency during crisis times. Helpper is offering their platform for free during the pandamic to match available neighbours to help each other out (e.g. doing groceries), and they’ve set up the Helpper phone line to help source volunteers for day-to-day chores. Play It Safe has developed the corona prevention game, to make sure that communication around the virus and its prevention is comprehensible to all of us. And also KARATON has launched eduational games for children aged 6 to 12 to make reading and writing exercise fun and engaging.
EDMIRE provides a creative solution to adhere to the social distancing rule with a template that is easily attachable to the floor. Catermonkey is offering their software solution for free during the pandemic, so small and medium sized businesses can save up to 70% of their time on administrative work. And Renta is offering transportation to medical personnel, as it provides 500 vehicles for healthcare providers to use, completely free of charge.
Onlinewerkrooster and Deliverect have developed the platform waarkanikafhalen.be, which maps out all the food take-out places, on which catering businesses can register for free. Spikes delivers a management solution for residential healthcare organisations to map out infection rate of their residents and employees, to ensure a safer work environment. Epic.blue offers their Gardian solution for free to health care workers and public authorities, thereby focusing on easily converting COVID-19 reporting from the field into actionable information. Breezo is developing a cost-effective and nature-based indoor air quality solution to provide healthy environments to live, work and sleep. And Awaere helps you to avoid touching your face in order to decrease the spread of the virus.
Tackling equipment shortage and communication challenges
In response to the shortage of protective gear, Twikit has developed a DIY, easy-to-make-at-home mask, as well as a reusable and comfortable mask for medical professionals. Materialise has released a 3D printing file to create plastic attachments for common kinds of door handles, so that you can open doors hands free to contain the spread of the virus. Spentys has been running their 3D printers at full capacity to develop all kinds of protection devices for hospitals and other organisations. Gear Up Medical is a newly founded non-profit that has built a low-cost, ultra basic ventilator in only 10 days time. They’re now working with over 20 partners to get it certified and start mass production. And No2Covid is already testing their simplified ventilator in a Belgian hospital, whilst going through the FDA fast track to get it medically approved.
And because communication is critical during these times, CAST offers easy-to-understand, animated videos to deliver the right message to the right people. And Into.care has developed Grapevine, which aims to upgrade the traditional bulletin board to its digital version so that internal team communication in care facilities becomes much easier, especially during these COVID-19 times.
Safely back to work
From this week onwards, many businesses are carefully opening their doors again. Emma.health makes it possible for companies to monitor the immunity of their personnel, which helps them to make decisions around safely getting their activities up and running again. Healthentia has rolled out similar features by using the insights from their clinical research platform to help businesses track their personnel’s health when starting up again. Lopos helps companies to keeps social distancing under control with their SafeDistance solution, a small Bluetooth wearable that automatically warns you if the required distance is not respected. And lastly, Romware has launched the same features for their industry bracelet.
This list isn’t at all exhaustive, as I’m sure tons of other COVID-19 initiatives have been set up. Entrepreneurs and innovators have rallied together in (international) hackathons such as HackTheCrisis, HackCorona and EUvsVirus, the Corona Think Tank has been founded, a Belgian COVID-19 First Responder Database has seen light of day, the Flemish Supercomputer Center provides computing resources to companies with groundbreaking ideas on the pandamic, the Flemish Government has initiated a Flanders Digital taskforce to map out all the digital initiatives that are related to the current coronacrisis, and much much more.
These collective efforts truly show the power of our entrepreneurial community, and I hope to see many of these initiatives continue their efforts once we regain control over the COVID-19 virus.
By the way, if you haven’t read the first of this two-part article — about the COVID-19 triage tools, at-home monitoring solutions and big data initiatives — , here’s is the link.
