About

Problem: Dementia refers to brain syndromes affecting memory, thinking, behavior and emotion and is the leading cause of disability and dependency among the elderly. Dementia patients estimated to be over 55m worldwide. In Greece, 160k people suffer from dementia & 280k are in a pre-dementia stage. The condition affects 1m citizens considering patients and caregivers. Residents in remote areas, to a large extent, never receive a Dementia diagnosis test. Their social routine also minimizes the chance to identify early signs of the disease. Moreover, diagnosed patients are impotent to adapt and left without care & support. Opportunity: The main idea is to create an AI robot-companion for senior people & potential Dementia patients, offering the opportunity to receive prompt diagnosis. Additionally, such a tool, following the diagnosis, can be used by the patient to assist with daily activities, help with communication & be capable of evaluating the user’s health state & report about it.

Solution & Product

Our pioneer solution will help patients diagnose & observe the disease progression using smart devices & wearables employing AI & IOT technologies. Intending to assist with daily activities, help with communication & engage in cognitive games that help keep the brain active, while utilizing gathered data to evaluate their health state & report to the caregiver or doctor. The robot should be able to carry out & memorize cohesive conversations on several fields of patient’s interest (music, news etc.) & over targeted questions evaluate user’s mental condition. When necessity recognized, must prompt the user to undergo specialized tests. The robot should also be equipped with mechanisms to understand the user’s voice tone & perform emotion - sentiment analysis. As a cloud-based solution, empowers doctors to remote check on communication logs stored, identify potential degradation of memory function & communicative difficulties that could signify deterioration of the patient’s condition.

Innovation & Scalability

Innovation • Memory: The AI Companion needs to remember everything that the interlocutor tells it so that the conversation could be meaningful. • Reactions: The AI Companion effectively responds to user’s intonation & voice pitch. Able to distinguish between positive and negative connotations of the context. • Reminder: AI mechanism, to remind the user about things a dementia patient can forget, (Ex. take medicine or meet relatives & friends). • Learn: The AI Companion is to be equipped it with an automatic function to independently search the internet for answers in unknown topics intending to learn continuously. • Evaluate: The AI Companion built to understand the user’s health state. When vital or in need, alert the caretakers, a doctor or even call for an ambulance. Ever-increasing demand and emerging technologies drive the need for innovation at scale. Scalability is a key driver for growth in high-tech companies as it is in our case. There is no universal formula to scaling applications, however, bellow we gathered some of the best-known practices that apply in our case. • Structure open to support new technologies • Use cloud-based storage offers more flexibility and make the system easier to scale. • Implement caching techniques allows the application to retrieve data from the database, which reduces the overall response time.

Traction & achievements

Online marketing & advertising is the most prudent tactics to generate traction for our startup, including paid search ads, display ads, social media ads, search engine optimization (SEO), etc. Another way to generate traction is through PR and media outreach. This involves getting our product featured in popular news channels and dementia related blogs. We can also generate traction through word-of-mouth marketing, by forming partnerships and affiliation with organizations and federations associated to Alzheimer or Dementia.

Team & Why Us

Dr S. Chandakas & E. Sbokou, being highly praised professionals in medical & marketing fields respectively, will be running the management & everyday activities. Why us? Because, the three key partners are: 1.tNational Technical University of Athens, Professor P. Tsanakas lab team developed systems on emotion & sentiment analysis & wearable’s technology that can be adopted & utilized for our product. 2.tMemorandum, a company that develops AI Applications & chatbots, will be working along us to develop all software, employing ML, NLP & NLU Techniques. 3.tNegotiations of the terms of our cooperation are taking place these days with University of Patra’s, Medical School. Neurology & Psychology departments are willing to team up with us on creating all dialogues & perform all testing, assuring the validity of medical information & appropriate structure of the dialogues.

Funding Needs

Contact us for more information about this aspect.