Associação Fraunhofer Portugal Research
11.12.2020
The technology transfer, entrepreneurship, and innovation internal program, AHEAD Portugal, was launched last September. Now that the application period has ended, the results show an outstanding outcome with the registration of 6 teams, in a total of 16 participants.
For the next phase of the program, which will take place in January, the 16 participants will attend a Bootcamp, where they will be given training, guidance and support by experienced mentors in order to have an opportunity to pass on to the next phase and take their proposed innovative solutions to the market. Only two teams will proceed to the acceleration phase that will run in 2021.
Regarding the submitted ideas and technologies proposed, the result could not have been more wide-ranging, covering health field, indoor localization, and natural language processing. Here is a brief presentation of each team and a summary of the ideas submitted:
Team: ANYLOC - Indoor Location, Anywhere
Members: Ricardo Santos, Tiago Rocha & André Carreiro
Field: Location-based services. Smart apps.
Idea description: “The existing technology has the potential to be used in many different scenarios. These range from navigation in large environments (e.g., guiding a user to a specific store in a shopping mall) to asset tracking (e.g., a portable ultrasound machine in a hospital, or a warehouse lifter), as well as targeted marketing, to name a few. Considering the specifications of each use case, the solution can be adapted to fit different needs, requiring more or less location precision”.
Team: Companion Blocks
Members: Nelson Cardoso & Fernando Ricaldoni
Field: Healthcare
Idea description: “Providing a customizable solution that allows remote health care support for different scenarios and end-users”.
Team: funding.ai
Members: Rita Gil Mata & João Costa
Field: NLP and Machine Learning
Idea description: “We want to utilize Machine Learning and NLP models to create an evaluation system for proposal text, analyzing its contents and language, to determine key weak points and report them back to the user, so they can be improved”.
Team: Guardian Angels
Members: Inês Lopes, Raquel Rodrigues & Paulo Torres
Field: Healthcare
Idea description: “To generalize a health system so it can suit different remote patient monitoring use cases, namely other chronic diseases, post-surgery follow-up, and pharma clinical trials. It will also be built in a modular fashion so it can be adjusted to different clinical and user needs (ex.: personalized rule-actions sets, integration of multiple device sets, use of AI to provide tailored user feedback and increase motivation and adherence)”.
Team: PeekingWindow
Members: Cristiana Braga, Filipe Soares & Ricardo Leonardo
Field: Healthcare; Artificial Intelligence, Decision Support Systems.
Idea description: “The envisaged technology (multi-disease CADx) will take an approach that is closer to how the ophthalmologists would evaluate a clinical case. Instead of predicting that an image of the eye either presents a certain specific pathology or is healthy, we will look at the whole clinical case (e.g. health records and functional parameters), not only the images, and process it as an anomaly detection problem first. Following this, the system will predict what kind of pathology is present, or if there are multiple of them, or refer the case to an expert in case of doubt.
Team: SmartVision
Members: Catarina Andrade, Francisco Veiga & Tudor Nedelcu
Field: Telemedicine, automated referral, melanoma detection
Idea description: “With the proposed solution, we aim at contributing to the field of prevention by providing a mobile application for standardized image acquisition and subsequently referral to the healthcare system. This solution aims to optimize the resources of health centers; reduce the number of clinical processes returned by dermatology departments; standardize the image quality acquisition of skin lesions”.
For more information regarding the AHEAD Portugal program, please click here or visit the official website www.ahead.fraunhofer.pt.
* AHEAD Portugal is the knowledge transfer, entrepreneurship and innovation program, under the umbrella of Fraunhofer Portugal Venture, which will count on private equity and entrepreneurial initiatives. It has been created at and for Fraunhofer, so that the actual people who have developed the technologies, have now the opportunity to take them to the market. AHEAD Portugal is tailored to challenge and promote complementary teams, establish actionable roadmaps, nurture pitching skills and intensively expose teams and tech to a broad external stakeholders’ network. In close connection with the German equivalent program, launched in 2019, AHEAD Portugal will benefit from this sharing and knowledge acquired over the years, as the German program gathers the expertise of having supported over 500 high-tech spin-offs & pushed over 200 ventures through their previous incubation system started in 2003.