vHeart is a platform for monitoring the health of patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases.
Last week, Croatian vHeart project entered the InsurTech Startupbootcamp programme in London, where it was selected as one of 11 best start-ups among a thousand applicants. The project is a platform for monitoring patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases, developed by scientist Nina Šesto, reports netokracija.com on December 12, 2017.
The vHeart team also includes Igor Šesto, Marin Bek, Hajdi Ćenan and Davor Runje. After two days of pitching in London, they first entered the finals of the InsurTech 2018 programme, which organises the Startupbootcamp accelerator, and later joined the programme itself, as one of 11 digital projects from the healthcare, on-demand insurance, sharing economy and other related fields.
Nina is proud of her success, but also of the team which has gathered around the project. The members came from the fields of medicine, technology and business, possessing the necessary skills to innovate in such a demanding area such as medicine.
The entire system for receiving and visualising ECG data has been developed by Marin, the CTO of the startup, and his Kraken company. In cooperation with the Telemedicine Centre of the Magdalena Clinic, the pilot phase of the project will start early next year.
“Our vision is the disruption of medicine by using new technologies, primarily machine learning and artificial intelligence. Initial service on which we are working is artificial intelligence to automate the diagnosis of heart diseases, with a 12-channel electrocardiogram that will enable scalable monitoring of cardiovascular patients,” said Nina.
Part of the project involving new technologies is covered by a team coming from the Drap agency. “We are primarily concerned with new technologies. Deep learning techniques and artificial intelligence are the most exciting technologies that have emerged in the last twenty years. In the past year, we have held 200 hours of training in this area at the HUB385 innovation centre, co-organized several meetups and one conference, and initiated internal projects such as Kafanabot and several projects for clients currently under development. All of these activities resulted in a meeting with Nina, whose vision is superb. There are many ways to make money using this technology, but none have such an impact on society as vHeart could have. It could be said that we are in the vHeart project will all our hearts, pun intended,” said Davor and Hajdi.
The team was trained for pitching by Ana Šimunović, a communication advisor and a public performance coach, who undoubtedly helped the vHeart team pass the demanding selection process – it initially involved 4,600 projects from 96 countries, with 1,000 applying, 22 entering the finals, and just eleven ultimately being selected. During the three-day selection process, each of the 22 finalists held two 90-second pitches, followed by 18 rounds of interviews with mentors, corporate partners and investors who were making a decision who would take part in the programme in London early next year.
The team has now returned to Croatia and will focus on further development. Nina revealed part of their plans for the project aimed at improving the quality of life of those suffering from cardiovascular diseases, but also at potentially reducing mortality. “About 17 million people die annually from cardiovascular diseases, which is twice as many as from cancer. The number of people living with this disease is much higher. Our goal is to improve the quality of life for them and their families through better monitoring and prevention, using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence. Such a service would also facilitate their treatment and have significant effects for reducing healthcare costs. This is in the interest of insurers and precisely the reason why we have focused our business development towards that sector. However, the most important thing is to save lives,” said Nina.
Translated from netokracija.com.
