Last but not least, here is the portrait of the final team that was selected for the long-awaited bootcamp, which will take place from March 24th to 26th. They will come to defend their project U-Care Medical. This project consists of a medical device to prevent acute kidney injury through AI algorithms and innovative sensors. The purpose is to provide care and save lives by transforming kidney care with AI. Their exciting interview is below.
Introduce yourselves (Who are you? Where do you come from? How many members does your team have?)
U-Care Medical is an Italian–based start-up-to-be, which includes a multi-disciplinary team of young researchers from Politecnico di Torino, all with an engineering background. It also relies on qualified professors, start-up professional experts and nephrologists. The team currently has 5 members.
What are the main motivations that led you to apply for the Arkathon Program?
The Arkathon Program represents a great opportunity for us to confront experts from several sectors such as business, healthcare and innovation, and to learn as much as we can from their experience. This program will also give us a chance of visibility and resonance on a European level.
What is your project about?
U-Care Medical designed a system to enable an early prediction of acute kidney injuries focusing on monitoring the diuresis trend over several hours. Data are automatically and continuously collected by the system and are processed in real-time using the power of an artificial intelligence algorithm, which are then used to estimate the probability of an AKI event occurring in the following hours. The first prediction is possible 12 hours after patient entry into the ICU and every subsequent hour a new prediction is calculated based on the preceding 12 hours of urine output. Our solution is thought to support the clinician’s work in improving quality and saving patients’ lives.
What needs does it respond to? How is it innovative?
At the present time, medical professionals complain about the absence of reliable tools for predicting kidney damage. Currently, nursing staff is tasked with monitoring the diuresis and manually type out the data, this inaccurate method increases the risk of errors and delays in AKI diagnosis. U-Care Medical introduces a significant innovation in treating renal disfunction and became a support to doctors helping them in customizing the patient’s therapeutic path. The solution proposed is a non-invasive one, it is placed directly on the drainage bag, urine output is automatically measured with high precision and the system provides a risk score that is continuously updated.
What do you think makes your approach to the bootcamp different?
Today, our system is one-of-a-kind in the field of renal dysfunction prevention. Existing solutions are chemical biomarkers that are interesting but not widely used in the hospital routine due to their difficulty in understanding the correct timing when executing the test; there are also other sophisticated monitoring systems which are invasive. The non-invasive nature of our solutions and the real-time updated level of risk surely represents our strengths. Moreover, the U-Care Medical system is versatile and will allow, in the future, the implementation of several functionalities by keeping the hardware unchanged and extending the software applications.
A final word?
U-Care Medical’s mission is to save lives by transforming kidney treatment through technological innovation.
For more information on this innovative project, you can consult their website: u-caremedical.com
