Arthronica uses AI to help patients with arthritis

by Startacus Admin

Arthronica, the London based startup that's using technology to help patients with arthritis

Arthritis is a difficult condition to monitor, simply because of the hassle and expense of the patient constantly having to make appointments with their doctor and be back and forth all the time. Trips that, due to the very reason for making them, can be difficult and painful. A potentially better way, then, would be if the patient could have their condition and its progression monitored from wherever they are.

This better way comes in the form of SaaS medtech startup Arthronica. Imperial College London 2020 PhD student Letizia Gionfrida has developed a platform that uses a simple phone camera or webcam and, of course, artificial intelligence to monitor the patient.

All you need to do is perform some basic movements as you would for your doctor, and the platform will save this footage to the cloud, where the AI will perform an analysis of it and return the data to both the patient and the healthcare provider.

The basic categories of this analysis are: skeletal tracking, wherein a model is trained on a dataset of one million fully labelled frames to increase accuracy of tracking; force, where the platform uses visual analysis alone to measure the pressure that the patient can use against an object; and 3D modelling, which creates a 3D model of the patient’s hands, which is then used to track the progression of swelling or the decrease of it due to medication.

Letizia Gionfrida has come a long way in a short time with Arthronica.

From Imperial College London’s MedTech SuperConnector medtech accelerator, the startup went on to win support from both Entrepreneur First and the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Centre, and raise £200,000 in funding from Versus Arthritis. Most recently, Arthronica was announced as one of the 10 finalists of Women Who Tech’s health-tech start-up challenge, to be held in Paris in October.

Arthritis affects around 350 million people around the world, and any technology that can help make those people’s lives that bit easier is worth keeping an eye on.

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• #startup
• #ai
• #medtech
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• #health
• #arthronica

Published on: 8th September 2019