2020
We are excited to start the year of 2020. We are sure it will be unforgettable and provide us tons of new valuable experiences. Sure, it will have its ups and downs, but we can’t wait for what it brings us. The year 2019 was already great for our project and we are expecting the following year to be even better. We have been working hard since the beginning of the year and we already have few new exciting announcements to make!
Let’s start from the first week of 2020. It began with a pitching event at North Savo Business Center, where we had an opportunity to meet and discuss with various business influencers. We got loads of good and constructive feedback and we were able to start discussions with some potential collaborators. More of which might be announced a bit later! Here is a pic of our Business Developer, Joona presenting our solution at the pitching event.
Sparking, Hacking, Findering
The year continued with positive news, as we were one of the 19 new teams that got accepted to the SPARK Finland patch of 2020. Check who else got accepted (www.sparkfinland.fi/projects). We have already attended in two SPARK events and are overwhelmed by the innovativeness of our fellow SPARKEEs. We have received a warm welcome and are really excited to be part of the global SPARK community. We are sure that the program provides us new viewpoints, constructive feedback and support that helps us to get to the next level!
We have been working hard to develop our solution both with its preciseness and usability. One of the core issues we are currently working on with, is a viable test version of our innovation. We are going to attend to the first ever HAVUJA HACK event (31.1-2.2) organized by North Savo Business Center. During the event, we are working together with local IT experts and innovators to create a mock-up version of our innovation. We would already want to thank the amazing people who are organizing this event. With the help of the mock-up version we can demonstrate our solution easily and are a step closer of testing it in the actual hospital environment. This naturally, would be a huge milestone for our project.
Before that, the next best thing is to continue the discussions with medical experts and receive their opinions and feedback. We have already conducted numerous of interviews, which has given us concrete objectives and guidelines for our project. We have also started discussions with university hospitals and are excited to announce our first public event. We are presenting our project in Findery Finland event at Kuopio University Hospital on 3.2.2020. We are hoping to meet you there! This event will be a good preparation for us for the upcoming ORS2020 conference, which we are participating between 6.-11.2.2020 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Algoa goes Phoenix
As we earlier informed, we qualified for the global Business Innovation Competition semi-finals. We are pitching our project on 9th of February and we are really excited for this opportunity! The past weeks we have been doing a lot of preparations for the event. We now have an impressive poster, which we have been working with two talented business designers from Kuopio (Iita Sallinen and Sonja Lehtomäki). They are a group of two entrepreneurs, soon launching their new company called Hathunters. Hathunters offers services to help companies towards great customer experience, innovative new services and products. We are extremely happy that we got the chance to meet them at the HAVUJA-accelerator program. Once again, thanks to the folks at the North Savo Business Center!
Progression, constantly
We have also had several discussions with potential investors. The most common questions we have been asked are: How precise is it?! When can you get it to the market?! To be honest, these are not the easiest questions to answer. First of all, commercializing a medical innovation is a heavily regulated process. Although we have a viable prototype of our software, it may still take a bit before it is available in the market. We still must solve the medical device regulations. Last year, we participated in a three-month medical approval process course, which gave us a comprehensive understanding of the regulatory processes for market access. It was a good start. Since it is one of the biggest obstacles we need to solve, we decided to strengthen our team in this area. Starting from march, a new member will join in our team to work with these issues. We will announce our bright and shiny enforcement in the next blog posts.
And finally, we took huge steps on the technology side. We have new results from our testing! Drum roll please…… We are pleased to inform that our newest results show that we are able to predict the development of knee osteoarthritis with an 80% precision. Why is this so exciting? Well, this prediction is done on images of healthy knees with no signs of the disease at the time of the imaging! Moreover, we can predict on what kind of a timeframe the disease will proceed. How great is that! In addition, we have made some adjustments in the usability and automatized some of the focal aspects of the user interface to reduce subjective aspects, thus improving the repeatability and objectiveness of the user interface also.
Until next time!
