AI-Driven Remote Digital Health

Award-winning deep learning model compression techniques to port these once costly Al algorithms into customized lightweight processes that can be run effectively in real-time on a variety of portable platforms, brining cutting-edge innovation to telemedicine and beyond than ever before.

Dr. Raymond Fu, Professor of Northeastern University, widely-renowned AI expert, research and successful serial entrepreneur (Founder and CEO of Giaran acquired by Shiseido; co-Founder and CTO of Tvision Insights). 

While inpatient therapy remains the preferred means for physiotherapy in terms of recovery times, home-based rehabilitation programs have gained importance and relevance due to the considerable flexibility afforded in tailoring the scheduling, intensity and duration of the rehabilitation regimen. The rehabilitation process tends to be labor-intensive, relying on inpatient diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that are administered by a clinician working with a single patient at a time. As the number of patients increased, limited availability of rehabilitation centers with specialized equipment and personnel support offer serious constraints, which is particularly acute for those people living in rural or remote locations. Most importantly, in the post COVID-19 pandemic, the industry has been witnessing high growth opportunities during 2020 and are likely to continue in 2021 owing to the subsequent shutdown of rehabilitation facilities, gyms and health clubs across the globe. Digital telemedicine solutions as we address hold great opportunities as they help improving clinical management, reduce variations in diagnosis, and make effective care delivery by enhancing quality and access to healthcare services. The global telemedicine market size was estimated at $41.4 Billion in 2019 and is expected to witness a CAGR of 15.1% and reaching addressable market $100 Billion in 2025. 

During post COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine and in-home fitness become new lifestyle and extremely demanding. More people choose to see doctors and work out remotely using mobile apps or video streaming. Lacking effective interaction and feedbacks, people overspend their efforts and lose engagement; their incorrect gesture and positions during rehabilitation may cause body injury. We provide health care providers, clinicians, therapists, and patients the most advanced AI-powered digital health solutions. Trainers and trainees in the sports and fitness fields, families with elderly and disabled members, telemedicine firms , behavioral health researchers are all potential users.

The novel technology helps healthcare organizations innovatively counter the increasing digital health need after pandemic, mitigate limited availability of in-person services. It bridges hospitals and homes via artificial intelligence, being extremely popular in the near future. It leverages a quantitative paradigm, both in terms of diagnosis and prescription; enables remote therapy and home-based rehabilitation, offering not only immense flexibility, but access to a significant portion of patient population. It enables patients and families to be seamlessly connected with clinicians and access services in non-contact manner. It provides alternative solutions for digital health services to adapt to our recent dramatic lifestyle changes. 

We provide customized light-weight deep learning solutions performing on portable devices for real-time human pose tracking and recognition. Our B2B business will license novel digital health product to established digital health service providers, e.g. rehabilitation centers, hospitals, wellness clubs, and university athletics departments. It greatly increases user engagement; avoids injury and enriches personalized user experiences. 

This project will enhance partnerships between academia and industry; improve public scientific literacy and engagement with science and technology. We are Northeastern University spinoff which is naturally fostered between academia and industry. The project will impact engineering and science education at various levels through collaborative research involvement by students from various backgrounds. Current members are from programs, such as Computer Science, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Management Communications, Information System, Digital Media, Marketing, Interactive Design, and Human Centered Informatics.

The technology commercialization will help healthcare organizations innovatively counter the increasing digital health need; mitigate limited availability of in-person services; enable patients/families to be seamlessly connected with clinicians and access services in non-contact manner. We strive to make health and wellness fun for children at home; protect and serve independent elderlies facing the overwhelmed healthcare systems; give wheelchair users the chance to participate in virtual sports and stay connected.

Our award-winning cutting-edge AI solutions will be advancing the health and welfare of the general public, especially the underserved or vulnerable populations. Over 61 million Americans are individuals with disability which have impairments in gross motor skills, physical fitness, and social interaction. Sedentary behaviors are high among them and fitness is of critical importance due to disproportionate rates of chronic disease they experienced. Participation in adaptive sports by this population becomes a critical need. The project will enable us to extend our unique AI solutions to this particular community so that more individuals with disability can engage in remote physical activities which will positively influence their mental, physical, social well-being and their overall quality of life. The team has started in-depth discussions with Harvard Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital regarding a joint research project to use our technology to remotely facilitate the performance of rehabilitation exercises with focus on restoring hand function in stroke survivors. Adults with disabilities are more likely to participate in community-based adaptive sports programs affiliated with a rehabilitation hospital network and/or run by rehabilitation professionals. Participation in adaptive sports by this population will become a critical strategy for our community‐based rehabilitation programs. 

As the telemedicine market are growing aggressively with high demand, our go-to market strategy is designed to achieve aggressive scaling to keep with the high demand in the market. The first step would be to leverage our investor and customer network, especially through word of mouth marketing. Furthermore, social media can be used to create brand engagement and awareness, and promote the launch of the product and website. Our focus for the first three years would be solely on our customers, given that customer testimonials go a long way towards establishing brand image. A part of networking would showcase our products through tech and industry specific trade shows and conferences, which would provide us with a large platform to showcase our products to a variety of potential customers.

To facilitate customer acquisition, the first step would be to strategize inbound marketing, to draw customers via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and branding. Furthermore, we would also provide our customers with customized beta/freemium options. Once being able to establish or maintain our presence, we can expand into adjacent markets, especially on-line/virtual market, such as nutrition, health monitoring devices and smart assistants in gyms and other health clubs. 

We plan to measure ROI via a benchmarking process: comparing patient satisfaction scores between different solutions; and comparing similar business functions with competitors. Metrics include how much be paying for the new solution, lowered employee stress levels from task automation or better customer service and increased patient satisfaction.

Our team has been in two paid pilot projects with a multi-national public technology company on light-weight Image Recognition technology. The bottleneck of their current products using the state-of-the-art AI models is running too slow with fairly large model size. Our initial model compression solution has speeded up their original algorithms 3 times faster and reduced model size 3 times smaller. We are entering next stage of partnership. 

Our team recently achieved the first-place winner of two Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference International Sign Language Competition. The impact of our technology reflects the spirit of our commitment to use-inspired discovery that produces meaningful contributions to humanity's grandest challenges. The benefits that our work will provide to the sense-impaired all around the world will echo for generations. 

We are in the stage of a financial gap between university commercialization and pre-seed round fund raising. This Trinity fund will be an important piece of support during this gap period to facilitate the research innovation and product completion.

During this development period within the budget allowed, we anticipate an actual industry standard product and system will be completed and qualified through test and demonstration. It will strongly support the next step which will be focusing on a fast-scaling round endeavor and market penetration.

This project is a spin-off from Northeastern University, led by Dr. Raymond Fu, Professor of Northeastern University, Boston, USA.

Trinity Challenge program seems a perfect fit to our project in terms of interest areas, technology novelty, and significant impact. We seek opportunities to access clinician leaders for product feedback and deeper understanding of workflow; technical expertise in clinical compliance, cybersecurity, and EHR interoperability; validate technology in clinical setting; consult experienced product strategists and business analysts on staff to help scale up; and access to Trinity ’s network of industry leaders and partners. Most importantly, the Trinity Challenge will provide us sufficient funding to fill in the gap and overcome our challenges.

Moreover, this program is aligned well with our objective of improving the resilience of health and economic systems, and addressing the disproportionate impacts of outbreaks and pandemics, particularly on vulnerable groups.

We would like to work with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation who are also focusing on solving the global health problems and improving the resilience of health and economic systems. Potentially they my link us to the right medical institutions to partner with on pilot and joint trials. We would also like to work with Johnson & Johnson or P&G or Philips who seek to positively impact human health through innovation. We believe they will work side-by-side with innovators throughout their journey, providing a robust exchange of ideas and resources to support our success. Our mission is aligned with their strategic plans to create the leading global innovation network to generate transformational healthcare solutions through value-creating partnerships. We are spin off from Northeastern University so naturally we will continue working with Northeastern University on technology innovation. We are also open to work with other members of the Trinity challenge as our technology is generic which can be broadly adopted for a variety of applications.