Category: Success Stories

From Womb To Cloud: This Startup Is Monitoring Maternal Health Using Smart Wearables

Jewellery is something that almost every woman loves to wear, but how about a pretty trinket that is cleverly masqueraded as a health tracking device?

Entrepreneur Senthilkumar realized this was the most effective way to constantly monitor the health of pregnant women in rural areas, where access to basic healthcare is hard to come by. His innovative bracelets and necklaces come embedded with minute IoT sensors, which constantly monitor and track a pregnant woman’s vitals. Combining aesthetics with technology is Senthilkumar’s med-tech startup JioVio Healthcare, which is heavily reliant on IoT and data analytics to monitor health parameters of pregnant women, new mothers, elderly and children.

The Need For Non-Invasive, Tech-Enabled Health Trackers In India’s Rural Pockets

 

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Maternal healthcare in rural India has never thrown up impressive numbers in the past, but technology is now reaching the remote corners of India to aid young women who require prenatal and antenatal care constantly. Research revealed to Kumar that pregnant women in India, especially in rural areas, fail to monitor the various health parameters necessary for their well-being during pregnancy. This could be attributed to a variety of factors such as lack of adequate healthcare centres in rural India and awareness surrounding the need for regular prenatal check-ups among other factors.

Moreover, gender biases too play a role in restricting women and children from seeking timely healthcare.

 

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How IoT and AI helps track critical maternal health parameters

Using technology to address societal and cultural constraints, Kumar and his team conceptualized portable healthcare kits called SaveMom that constantly monitor the health of women in a non-invasive manner.

One such device was a bracelet or necklace with colourful beads, which IoT-enabled contains sensors designed to track a number of activities such as number of steps taken, calories burnt and sleeping patterns. Based on the constant patient input, the sensors send the patient data to a device that provides reminders to the women to take their prenatal supplements, eat their food on time and drink suffidxcient water.

The device connects to the user’s phone via Bluetooth and transfers patient data to the cloud.

Another device in the AlloMom kit is a smart tablet, given to healthcare workers, which check parameters like blood pressure, glucose levels, body weight, temperature, pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation and automatically upload this data on a cloud.

Through software developed by Kumar and his team, the patient data would be constantly monitored using AI, making it easier to segregate women based on their risk levels. If a woman was detected as high risk, her data would immediately be sent to the nearest healthcare centre where she would be called in for a check-up.

From Maternal Care to Elderly Care

 

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Now, there are a suite of other products made by JioVio Healthcare, which are intended to track vital information of infants and elderly, especially in rural areas. Similar to SaveMom is AlloMom, a combination of a mobile app that sends a constant feed of a pregnant woman’s vital information to her primary caretaker, and a portable kit including a sensor-enabled wearable device that feeds real-time information about the mother into a cloud.

AlloBaby, meant to track infant development, observes a child’s underlying development for 1000 days including speech, movement, and other important infant milestones.

While infant and child care is an overlooked aspect of the healthcare spectrum in rural India, so is geriatric care. Kumar launched AlloOldCare, which monitors vital parameters of the elderly. It comprises of a wearable gadget with sensors that tracks activities like sleeping, physical activity, food intake, blood pressure and other aspects, and feeds the data into a portable application. Allo Old Care also sends specialists to the elderly person’s home when needed and provides for easy prescription and refill of medicines through the app.

Wearable Technology & AI Powering The Future of India’s Healthcare Industry

With a billion-strong population, India needs quality healthcare services in every corner of the country. While Tier 1 cities have a multitude of options to choose from, Tier 2 and 3 towns and villages unfortunately lack access to quality healthcare. Moreover, rising costs of healthcare and poor infrastructure has paved the way for technology to fill gaps in healthcare delivery.

What will really propel the quality of healthcare solutions by enabling a further, wider reach is the use of technologies like AI and IoT. One of the most impactful healthcare trends of 2019 is the growth of home healthcare facilities, being made popular by health tech startups that are conceptualising smart wearables and portable healthcare kits.

Wearables, powered by IoT, are extending the healthcare continuum from fitness & activity tracking to managing chronic conditions like diabetes and cardiac health. According to Tractica’s Wearable Device Market Forecasts report, wearable device shipments can scale to 430 million by 2022.

In addition, AI is playing a hugely transformational role in harnessing, synthesising and processing patient data to extract meaningful insights, and further enrich the healthcare industry’s knowledge base.

JioVio Healthcare was initiated into NASSCOM’s Center of Excellence for IoT in Bangalore in February 2017. Working out of the Center of Excellence was hugely beneficial to Senthilkumar and his team, as they got more recognition from the community of product startups, investors and innovators. Moreover, NASSCOM’s extensive network of industry connections helped them gain access to quality industry events and happenings within the startup community.

CoE Gurugram and IBM enabling a community of developers with skills in Machine Learning

Most websites selling products online show you a list of items that you might be interested in. The better the recommendations, the more likely that you will buy any of these, which will increase their sales. But how are these recommendations created?

Center of Excellence – IoT, Gurugram along with IBM organised a hands-on Session to build a Machine Learning-based interactive recommendation engine using IBM Watson Studio, Watson Machine Learning, Apache Spark & PixieDust.

There were more than 130 registrations and the session was attended by more than 60 advanced developers some of whom were from organisations like Nagarro, United Airlines, TCS, Sanyog Pharma & TV Today Network.

The session enabled the attendees to develop & deploy an IBM Watson based Recommendation Engine for their business use cases.

Agenda:

  • Introduction to Machine Learning concepts
  • Basics of Recommender Systems
  • Understanding types of recommender systems:
  • Content based recommender systems
  • Collaborative filtering
  • User-User collaborative filtering
  • Item-Item Collaborative filtering
  • Hybrid Methods
  • Case Study
  • Hands-On (Building a pixie dust based app for recommending shopping cart products)

 Key Takeaways for Attendees:

By the end of the session, attendees were able to understand how to build a model to provide product recommendations for customers based on their purchase history.  They had created their own Jupyter notebook, which included:

  • Loading historical shopping data
  • Structuring and viewing that data in a table that displays customer information, product categories, and shopping history details
  • Using the k-means algorithm, which is useful for cluster analysis in data mining, to segment customers into clusters for the purpose of making an in-store purchase recommendation based on shopping history
  • Deploying the model to the IBM Watson Machine Learning service in IBM Cloud to create your recommendation application

If you are a developer who wants to learn new skills, or an enterprise that is at the forefront of innovation hoping to evangelize the nation’s growing community of software/ hardware developers, contact Shantanu Gaur at shantanu@nasscom.in

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Transforming Sports Gear into Smart Devices to Deliver Real-Time Analytics

The Success Story of SeeHow, a NASSCOM CoE Incubatee

Sports analytics, which has been fairly unchartered territory in India, is now rising in popularity. While the global market is pegged at reaching $4.5bn by 2024, the Indian market is playing catch up. Specifically, the data analytics and AI bug seems to have caught cricket aficionados who are now capitalising on advanced technology to understand finer nuances of the sport.

Bangalore-based technology startup SeeHow is transforming traditional sports gear into smart devices using high-end sensors and employ proprietary algorithms to deliver real-time analytics, feedback and coaching advice that enable players to track and improve their game. read more

Data-driven insights for an improved game on the cricket field

The Success Story of str8bat, a NASSCOM CoE Incubated Deeptech Startup

Deep tech, IoT-enabled analytics platform to aid player performance in Cricket and other sports

Data has become the new currency for businesses today, as technologies are harnessing huge amounts of data, extracting meaningful and strategic insights to improve productivity, enhance efficiency or simply solve a challenge.

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Success Story – Cradlewise

A smart solution for mothers to track the breathing of the babies in the cradle and alert them with unsafe sleeping positions

The first year of parenting revolves around the baby’s sleeping schedule as babies on average sleep 16 hours a day, but only an hour or two at a time. This quickly gets exhausting and affects the quality of life of the entire family.
Cradle is the first piece of furniture the baby acquires and spends considerable amount time in it. The sleeping positions keep changing and the babies accidentally keep pulling the sheet covers over them obstructing their breathing, posing a threat. This is a safety challenge to be managed continuously by the exhausted parents.

“ This is the best gift you can ever give to your child. It is an experience not just for the baby, but for the parent as well.”

– Ms.Gail Fernandez, Teacher

“ My baby is now very active because she sleeps well. This has also given me enough sleep and I also feel good after being well rested.”

– Ms.Prajwala Mohit, Dy. Commissioner, IRS

Smart Cradle a novel invention from CradleWise

Now parents, especially the mothers can breathe easy and no longer worry about their baby’s safety. The Smart Cradle has an integrated contactless baby monitor. The AI enabled sensor network looks for baby discomfort and early wake-up signals and puts the baby back to sleep by automatically rocking the cradle. The integrated monitor looks for unsafe sleep positions, tracks breathing and alerts the parents in case of irregularities. There is also an in-built video and audio monitor. All of these are customizable though a smartphone app.

Incubated at NASSCOM Centre of Excellence for IoT, CradleWise has won several accolades around the country. Some of the achievements : Winner of Economic Times Power of Ideas 2017, Winner of Govvt. of Karnataka Startup Award 2017, in Top 15 at Qualcomm Design India Challenge 2018 and Winner of Yourstory Tech30 2018.

“ Incubation at CoE-IoT helped us leapfrog our product readiness. The thriving eco-system and the opportunities for industry-connect helped us validate our product quickly.

–Ms. Radhika Patil, Co-Founder and CEO

About LHIF
LHIF – Lifesciences & Healthcare Innovation Forum is an initiative of NASSCOM Centre of Excellence for AI and IoT, for engaging the Hospitals, Diagnostic Labs, Doctors, Pharma Companies, Medical Devices Manufacturers, Insurance players, Academicians, Government Bodies, Innovators, Technology Companies, Research Institutions, Industry Associations, Investors and Mentors, on a common platform, to promote innovation and accelerate the technology adoption by the industry. For more details please write to us at LHIF@nasscom.in.

The Story of Digital Transformation at Baby Memorial Hospital, Kozhikode

Re-imagining the In-hospital Equipment Handling System
Using a Low-Cost & Real-Time Location System

Significant time for medical professionals, especially the nursing staff goes in chasing the support staff for movement of patients and mobilizing the medical equipment. Besides having adverse impact on customer satisfaction, delays in in-hospital Equipment Handling may at times be fatal to the patients. Often there are no systems or mechanisms to raise these requests and track the fulfilment.

The situation was no different at Baby Memorial Hospital (BMH). The technology team at BMH took this as a challenge and implemented a simple and cost-effective solution.

“ Timely handling of patients and movement of surgical equipment is as essential as the actual clinical procedure and the medicines. They play a vital role in saving the lives of the patients, especially in the golden hour of the medical care”

Using Bluetooth Low Energy beacon sensors attached to the equipment, the team developed a real-time location monitoring system to track all the equipment. Similar to the apps used by cab aggregators and food delivery companies, nurses can now request for an equipment using a smart phone. The in-hospital handling staff gets a notification request. The system shows the nearest equipment and assigns it to the request. The nursing staff can monitor the movement of the equipment till it reaches its intended destination. Once the delivery is done the handling team confirms the fulfilment status using the smart phone provided to them.

As per Dr. Anju Mirian Alex, the COO of BMH, “The real-time location system has significantly improved the transportation system. The nurses are happy that their requests are serviced quickly. The access to real-time demand data has enabled me to optimise manpower allocation throughout the hospital.”

“It is a low-cost implementation using some innovative solutions from start-ups. This solution has significantly boosted staff morale resulting in a 10% increase in employee satisfaction”


– Mr.Saji Mathew, Chief of HR & IT

‘I am very pleased with the outcome of this project. The new system has enabled us to harness technology to improve service delivery while simultaneously reducing the cost of service. We want to provide the best experience for our patients and caregivers; this system has helped in moving us one step closer towards our goal.’

– Dr. K G Alexander, Chairman and Managing Director

LHIF Report Nov 2018

Event Report

In an era where everything is available at the click of a button or swipe of a finger, why should the healthcare industry be limited to traditional ways? The need for technology adoption by healthcare industry is more compelling now than ever before. Today, the world of telemedicine and digital healthcare is a coveted field for many startups looking to make their mark in an industry that’s currently on a rise.

(Pronounced as LIFE) – LHIF (Lifesciences & Healthcare Innovation Forum) is a first-of-its-kind initiative by NASSCOM Center of Excellence for AI/IoT to provide a collaborative platform for the healthcare delivery eco-system to explore and adopt innovation in their organizations.

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Say hello to #LHIF

The Life Sciences and Healthcare Industry is expected to grow exponentially in India. Federal and State governments across the globe are pushing the pedal on transformational initiatives to achieve these challenging goals. Launch of National Heath Protection Scheme and the intent to establish 150,000 wellness centres under the Ayushman Bharat Yojana, is a major step by the Indian Government towards achieving the UHC goals, presenting major growth opportunities for all the players in Life Sciences & Healthcare Industry.

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Overview of the Indian #sportstech landscape

More than just cricket

The Indian sports tech space is still in a very nascent stage but there have been significant strides made over the last 18–24 months. Properties such as the Indian Super League (Football) and Pro Kabaddi League can’t yet compete with the commercial clout of the Indian Premier League (Cricket), but their growing popularity and the increased interest in other alternative sports such as marathons, cycling and even eSports is indicative of a growing sports economy thus presents opportunities for startups. read more

STR8BAT gives INSTANT, VISUAL and ACTIONABLE IN-SIGHTS, HELPING PLAYERS PLAY BETTER EVERYDAY

Str8bat’s technology and features allows to improve one’s game. It is designed for both serious and casual players of Cricket, it’s accessible and affordable. read more

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