CAN-EYE: Remote rehabilitation app for low vision children
First of all, we believe that smarter use of digital technology and data will empower people to lead healthier and more independent lives.
Low vision in childhood can be due to many reasons. Congenital cataract and other anterior segmental problems, retinopathy due to premature birth, hypoxic birth, and delayed visual maturation are some of the most common causes of low vision in the newborn period. Progressive Strabismus and refractive defects are also seen as causes of low vision.
In underdeveloped countries, causes such as corneal damages due to deficiency of vitamin A or measles infection, cataract and glaucoma are in the foreground, while hereditary retinal diseases or congenital eyeball abnormalities are more common in developed countries than other causes.
Deprivation of oxygen during childbirth, premature retinopathy in premature babies and deprivation of adequate visual stimulation for a long time are also other important causes of low vision in childhood.
Based on the causes counted above and according to World Health Organization (WHO) there are approximately 1.5 million children with no vision but on the other hand, there are 5 million children with low vision in the world.
Today, as a result of developments in the field of intensive care, extremely premature babies are holding to life. Both term and preterm infants who remain for months during the treatment process in the incubator in neonatal intensive care units are unfortunately far from the visual stimuli. These babies can also be called as low vision candidates besides congenital cataracts, glaucoma and intraventricular haemorrhage which are causing low vision in infants and children.
Children aged less than 18 months with visual impairment at least at one eye are planned to be referred to a developmental programme, carried by the occupational therapists at rehab centers. Occupational therapists work to increase the participation of people in daily life by increasing their functional vision. Occupational therapy intervention programs are implemented client-centered and interactively with the person face to face.
Most rehabilitation centers across the world are unable to provide routine, face-to-face services as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Individual-centered and interactive low vision therapy programs were adversely affected during the COVID-19 pandemic. To continue the intervention programs, it was inevitable to produce alternative solutions.
As a result. The problem is, “The children with low vision are deprived of visual and cognitive rehabilitation programme because of pandemic, lack of awareness and resources, logistics and families' time management problems.
By wrapping care around the mother and her family, the UK NHS aims to give every child the best start in life possible, from birth to their transition into adulthood. Our technology fits the long-term plan of NHS - https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/areas-of-work/starting-well/
Promoting preventive and rehabilitation interventions is recognised as a high priority for all care settings as a way of reducing demands on health and social care services
In 2010, the Department of Health urged local authorities to invest in early intervention and consider offering people in need of care and support a short period of rehabilitation before an assessment of longer-term needs is undertaken.
Our solution, named "can-eye" provides remote and early vision specific cognitive developmental support with visual stimuli on mobile platforms. "can-eye" provides exercises for all children at risk with traceability and reporting functions for ophthalmologists on mobile platforms to prevent low vision to give these children independence in the future.
"can-eye" is a visionary application, used in parental control, which was created by engineers, neonatologists, ophthalmologists and occupational therapists to support the visual and cognitive development of infants and children with low vision/visual impairment or under the risk of low vision.
Our innovation, which is designed with the necessity of social distance due to COVID-19, will ensure that the low vision rehabilitation services do reach the larger masses without any problems. As mobile technologies are getting more advanced and affordable, visually controlled tablet screens can be used to support home-based therapy programs.
Rehabilitation services are also expensive for governments around the world. For every one hour spent by vision rehabilitation teams in face to face contact with clients the cost is £60 in the UK. can-eye might be introduced as a new way of low cost visual and cognitive rehabilitation tool for children at home with annual subscription fee of £99.99 in the EU.
"can-eye" includes both functional exercises for infants and children to stimulate the sense of vision with innovative reporting functions for doctors and the informative screens about the low vision for families.
”can-eye” can help families who have children with low vision or at risk of low vision mostly by prematurity. It aims to help with early self-rehabilitation of low vision, at home during these pandemic days and in the new normal.
There are 5 million children with low vision in the world. Unfortunately, thousands are adding up to this number every year due to congenital cataract, other anterior segmental problems, retinopathy of prematurity, hypoxic birth, and delayed visual maturation. We developed mobile app "can-eye", to provide remote and early vision specific developmental support for children with low vision.
"can-eye" comprises a range of personalized rehabilitation exercises for infants that help to stimulate and develop children's visual and cognitive skills, It also provides performance tracking and sharing function for caregivers.
We’ve currently developed three modules designed within our app that targets a specific purpose and placed our innovation into the app stores.
- Module A - developing children's recognition of lights and shapes
- Module B - focusing on developing perception of light, colours and movements
- Module C - designed to improve hand-eye coordination
The current version of "can-eye" provides exercises for all children at risk with traceability and reporting functions for ophthalmologists on mobile platforms to prevent low vision.
The primary aim is improving visual functions of babies with low vision. This includes improvement of fixation time and stimulation of saccadic/smooth pursuit movements. Our overall product focuses on these four current and new developed features:
- Improved object follow-up
- Prolonged object follow-up time
- Greater levels of fixation to visual targets
- Reduction of nystagmus severity
We built people-centered health service that makes essential care and equipment more accessible and affordable for low vision children communities that are currently underserved.
My name is Tolga Erol, CEO and Co-founder of INOCER, London-based health-tech startup.
I am a father of two wonderful visually impaired children.
I, together with my paediatrician wife, our ophthalmologist and the occupational therapist of our children together have developed a remote rehabilitation app for the children with and at risk of low vision/visual impairment.
As an intimate father who is working on the improvement of his own children’s eyesight for years and as an entrepreneur, I wanted to make this app available for the children suffering from similar conditions.
These children are now locked down at homes and cannot get enough rehabilitation because of COVID-19 pandemic. I can absolutely help them amid this pandemic with my innovation. They can pursue getting rehabilitation at home.
About the Team:
Inocer team has over a totally 90-years of expertise and experience within software development and healthcare.
Inocer is a London-based health-tech start-up, founded by two seasoned engineers and two consultant medical doctors to create innovations in healthcare domain. We work on our own innovative software products like mobile applications and AI based decision support systems. We are developing all of our products together with clinicians and domain experts. Our goal is to solve real-world healthcare problems with technological innovations to create tangible impacts on patients, families of patients and most importantly in NHS.
Tolga Erol, CEO and CTO, Inocer. Operational and technical management of the team
As seasoned engineer, he has nearly 20 years of international work experience at automotive, healthcare, defence and IT industries. His recent role was Technology & Innovation Manager at a large scale global IT and system solutions company. He worked as Project Manager at General Electric Healthcare. He is expertized on Technology Development, Innovation, R&D and Project Management. He won 7 innovation and leadership awards. He joined nearly 200+ trainings at different levels including Leadership Development Programs. He is also certified mentor for technology start-ups. He has 6 patent applications and 10 internationally published articles. He is analytic thinker, perfect planner, creative, result oriented, initiative and responsibility taker, strong communicator and proven leader.
Pinar A. Ozer, Assoc.Prof, MD
Pinar is a Consultant Ophthalmologist, defining ophthalmologic requirements in the team, with 20 years experience in the healthcare profession within the clinical settings. Has over 20 publications published and expertized on low-vision.
Sara Erol, Assoc.Prof, MD
Sara is a free researcher. She is a Consultant Paediatrician and Neonatologist, defining pediatric requirements in the team, with nearly 20 years experience. Recently worked at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Has over 25 publications published.
David Amor, Engagement Manager
David is an Engagement Manager with strong personable skills engaging with stakeholders, families of low vision children, local communities, charities and other target audiences of “can-eye”.
- Build fundamental, resilient, and people-centered health infrastructure that makes essential services, equipment, and medicines more accessible and affordable for communities that are currently underserved;
- Growth
The overall project to develop a system introducing an emerging technology into a new market poses technical and commercial challenges.
Technology is the best way to deliver a positive impact at scale. The use of tech should either allow a greater scale of solution or facilitate a new way of approaching the problem. But sometimes the implementation of technology might be difficult due to lack of awareness and resistance to change. Families may worry about the negative effects of screen exposure, We can overcome this challenge by training and presenting already available clinical evidences against adverse opinions. https://www.rcpch.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-12/rcpch_screen_time_guide_-_final.pdf
We want to understand how we can discover the potential of our business to reach a £100m enterprise value within 10 years time by positively impacting millions of lives.
We also want to create key connections to warmly introduce us with investors and healthcare experts.
Since our innovation was developed with the specific intention of creating positive social impact for the children with low vision, we need get tailored life-long support.
Operational Challenge: One of the challenges we face with is to deliver a visual rehabilitation to the children in need. With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of future disruptions to our daily lives, can-eye ensures that patients can continue their rehabilitation/treatment of their eye condition without unnecessary trips to the hospital to putting the health of the children and parents at risk of exposure to these life-threatening viruses. Pandemics have resulted in a loss of care for many patients, as the NHS seeks to avoid avoidable and unnecessary disease outbreaks.
For some UK regions without sufficient care-plans for low-vision patients, can-eye will ensure these children will continue their rehabilitation without expensive travel for parents to a referral hospital and ensures the child receives care in a familiar place (their home).
SOLVE may help us to introduce us to the families in need, clinics and rehab centers by using your network.
We cannot raise sufficient funds to fully cover this level of innovation, pace of development and requirement to turn bespoke operational prototypes into a generic platform on its own. Despite the compelling business case, the project is an expensive undertaking that is currently outside our capability to finance alone. We are looking for external funding as grant or an investment. External funding would significantly contribute to:
Accelerating route to market
Accelerating the execution of development roadmap
Reducing operation risks
- Product / Service Distribution (e.g. expanding client base)
Current State of the Art (SotA) and Competitors:
There are visual stimulation apps like Treebetty(USA), Onni-Ilona(FIN) and Bebedou(UK) but no applications on the market offer habilitation and stimulation for low vision children with the functionalities we envision. There are tried-and-tested traditional physical solutions but none of these provide intuitive exercises as "can-eye" provide.
Our technology personalises rehabilitation for low vision suffering children by generating thousands of unique shapes, faces, stripes animations, games and combinations. Our USP for the current version is that none of the existing digital apps have a feature to follow-up daily exercises to trace babies' progress and report the results to ophthalmologists remotely.
The current version of can-eye provides exercises for all children at
risk with traceability and reporting functions for ophthalmologists on
mobile platforms to prevent low vision.
Our current offering is already ahead of the competition regarding progress tracing and reporting remotely to ophthalmologists.
Our project will work on development of four new innovations in this
project to current product. Adding all these new features will
differentiate us from competitors and create game-changing product.
1.Cognitive development games-- visually stimulating
games will be developed, approved by clinicians, to maximise the
engagement of the patients by enjoying time spent during rehabilitation.
2.Dichoptic therapy module-- this promising new therapeutic approach is based on simultaneous and separate stimulation of both eyes (thus dichoptic). The contrast for the good eye is reduced in purpose of providing an artificial balance with the amblyopic eye.
3.VR implementation-- by developing the VR-functionality to function on smartphones and headsets for visual acuity assessment.
4.Eye-tracking functions-- VR implementation for generation of OKN (Optokinetic Nystagmus) and it's monitorisation by Video-nystagmography. We will use consumer hardware for cost-effectivity. We will accommodate it for different face sizes.
Every year, over 100,000 babies are cared for in a NICU in the UK. 1 in 7 babies born in the UK each year are admitted onto NICUs. If we focus on our risk group, which includes babies with birth gestation on a neonatal unit before 32 weeks plus children in community care and infants with known delayed visual maturation and visual impairment.
Each year an annual average of 20,000 children are at risk of low
vision and require visual habilitation. Globally this number extents to 2
million children annually.
The UK’s healthcare cost linked to eye health is estimated to be at least £3bn annually. This includes the cost of providing NHS eye examinations, prescriptions and hospital services such as outpatient appointments and inpatient procedures. Indirect costs associated with sight loss cost the UK economy around £6 billion every year[RNIB]. The highest indirect costs are lower employment rates amongst people with visual impairment and the cost to family and friends of providing informal care.
Good vision rehabilitation avoids significant health and social care costs; the costs avoided are more than three times the cost of delivering the service.
The NHS could potentially save at least £10 million annually through can-eye and eliminate treatment of these children's eye care and decrease clinic utilisation by 10%. Our target of reaching 20,000 families every year they can save 20% on their health expenditures and improve their mental-health and wellbeing.
One of the major impacts that cannot be quantified is the independence
of children will gain/regain through habilitation and rehabilitation of
their eyesight. It will improve their social inclusion with friends and
family. Longer-term this will enable the rehabilitated children to find
employment much easier without the need for special inclusion measures
or assistance.
The cost to the patient’s family is beyond an economic expense due to the time commitment of travelling to hospitals. Businesses are also affected through loss of productivity if the parent takes time off work or the child becomes an adult and enters the working world. Families will also experience improved mental-health and wellbeing through improvement of their child’s eye health and sight improvement.
Through reduced resource consumption can-eye will have a lower environmental footprint than existing treatments and technologies used by the NHS and global healthcare providers – particularly in developing countries. Some software technologies such as data mining have high energy consumption to sustain the activity; can-eye will not be affected by this trend and therefore will have no detrimental impacts to the environment.
Perhaps the only detrimental impact the project may have is reducing the work for rehabilitation specialists who work with low-vision sufferers. However, improving eyesight is a worthy remedy for this.
"can-eye" has the potential to positively impact millions of lives all over the world. Let's do this together SOLVE.
We aim to achieve following key activities in the following years:
- Conduct further technical feasibility and design research
- Develop the next prototype version of can-eye
- Verification and validation of the can-eye v2
- Planning of clinical trials
We aim to design clinical trials with organisations within the NHS in order to observe short and long term effects of can-eye for the children from birth-to-4-years. Through stakeholder engagement, the clinical trials will primarily identify the efficacy of using "can-eye".
We will work under the supervision of subject matter experts, try to reach potential users and plan clinical trials for our innovation with large number of patients including their families in cooperation with NHS, pediatric and ophthalmology clinics and charities.
Eventual approvals by the NHS and international healthcare organisations would remove the financial burden for families through prescriptions. Our goal is that future successful clinical trials would result in insurance companies to cover the cost for families through health insurance policies and charities would be able to cover the costs for families in need.
The exponential growth in revenue will allow the staff headcount to expand from four to at least 20 staff by the end of year five. This realistic aim for growth will help the company to reinvest more money in conducting future R&D.
A significant portion of the patients with low vision can be managed
when diagnosed at young ages and have the potential to be rehabilitated
with modern approaches of occupational therapy.
In the UK alone, there are at least 20,000 children yearly who are at risk of low vision due to congenital cataract, glaucoma, neurological diseases, prematurity and intraventricular haemorrhage, and so on. Our innovation "can-eye" aims to give independence to children in the future, who are suffering from low vision by giving early vision specific developmental support. This aim fits 100% to one of the innovation areas of NHS, which is independent living and well-being.
The International Council of Opthalmology (ICO) estimates the global cost of vision problems for 0-17 age-group as $5bn annually
Globally there are 285m (all ages) sufferers of no vision worldwide with 350k of which in the UK. World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that over 80% of global visual impairment is preventable or treatable from a young age, as the WHO estimates that there around 5m children worldwide with low vision. With early and proper visual stimuli rehabilitation, this can be a treatable affliction to reduce the financial burden for healthcare systems and improve the emotional well-being of patients.
So
"can-eye" aims to make every year 20,000 healthier children by supporting their eyesight and create happier families. We want to give these children independence in their future and improve their quality of life.
We anticipate this projected figure will potentially increase x10 times
once we perform successful clinical trials and penetrate into global
markets including Europe and North America initially.
On the other hand, technically our overall product focuses on :
*Prolonged object follow-up
*Greater levels of fixation to visual targets
*Reduction of nystagmus
The cost to the patient's family is beyond an economic expense due to the time commitment of travelling to hospitals. Businesses are also affected through loss of productivity if the parent takes time off work or the child becomes an adult and enters the working world. Families will also experience improved mental-health and well-being through improvement of their child's eye health and sight improvement.
Our innovation targets the two following sustainable development goals
*SDG 3: good health and well-being
With over 20,000 low vision sufferers annually in the UK, their health, welfare and well-being will be affected by this problem. By utilising the functional exercises for infants and children, this will support their visual and cognitive development to improve their life in a profound way. "can-eye" will improve the child's sense of independence, by reducing the need in childhood for specialist care or education measures to adapt to low vision sight. "can-eye" will improve their social lives, as evidence suggest low vision children find it harder to form social networks and developing relationships.
*SDG 4: quality education
One of the major impacts that cannot be quantified is the independence of children will gain/regain through habilitation and rehabilitation of their eyesight. It will improve their social inclusion with friends and family. Longer-term this will enable the rehabilitated children to find employment much easier without the need for special inclusion measures or assistance. In turn, this ensures they have a productive and quality education without the requirement of special needs or support.
The project focus on using can-eye in the field; hospitals, schools, cooperating with local authorities, ministers to meet the SDG targets. We believe that "can-eye" meets the two following targets:
3.8 Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all
3.8.1 Coverage of essential health services (defined as the average coverage of essential services based on tracer interventions that include reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health, infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases and service capacity and access, among the general and the most disadvantaged population)
4.2 By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education
4.2.1 Proportion of children under 5 years of age who are developmentally on track in health, learning and psychosocial well-being, by sex.
Low vision in children has been making their and parents' life difficult day by day. According to WHO, around 1 billion people, including children, are visually impaired. Rehabilitation technique has been known for many years for the treatment of low vision in children. Due to Covid-19, there is severe disruption of low vision rehabilitation in many countries including the United Kingdom and Covid-19 has led to an increase in demand for low vision rehabilitation. But did we ever wonder what if technology could act as a virtual rehabilitation centre and help thousands of children visually impaired? What if our smartphones could help us with the rehabilitation for low vision?
Technology can act as a virtual rehabilitation centre and help thousands of children with visual impairment. Thankfully, we have created “can-eye” , a mobile application which provides various types of visual stimulation exercises for visually impaired children which are fun and enjoyable which would help develop your child’s vision and prevent low vision from developing further. “Can-eye” aims to help thousands of children with low vision, improve their lifestyle and create a bright independent future for them. For more information visit: https://www.caneyecu.com/
“can-eye” is a mobile application which serves as a powerful resource for children and infants who suffer from visual impairments. “can-eye” is full of stimulating exercises which are specifically tailored to your child's needs. Following some brief introductory questions, “can-eye” is able to recommend specific modules which will be beneficial to your child, each packed with an exciting range of exercises which aid visual and cognitive development. Each module is designed to target a specific purpose,
Module A - developing children's recognition of lights and shapes
Module B - focusing on developing perception of light, colours and movements
Module C - designed to improve hand-eye coordination by games, real-world objects and sceneries.
Can-eye v2 Modules (Features to be developed)
We have discussed these features with several subject matter experts like opthalmologists and therapist. The selection of the proposed new features was made based on their need.
1. Cognitive development games – visually stimulating games will be developed, approved by clinicians, to maximise the engagement of the patients by enjoying time spent during rehabilitation.
2. Dichoptic therapy module - Dichoptic training is a promising new therapeutic approach investigated in many studies for its effectivity in amblyopia treatment. It is based on simultaneous and separate stimulation of both eyes (thus dichoptic). The contrast for the good eye is reduced in purpose of providing an artificial balance with the amblyopic eye. In addition to dichoptic treatment, dichoptic feature films are recently reported to be a promising new treatment modality for childhood amblyopia. (Li SL et al. J AAPOS. 2015 Oct;19(5):401-5. doi: 10.1016/j.jaapos.2015.08.003) Passive viewing of dichoptic feature films is feasible and easily applicable for all age groups. Dichoptic training using a virtual reality head mounted display system is a new approach too, which seems to be an effective option of treatment in adults with anisometropic amblyopia. (Žiak et al. BMC Ophthalmology (2017) 17:105 DOI 10.1186/s12886-017-0501-8). Dichoptic treatment in “can-eye” can serve as an additional treatment strategy in children with ambliyopia, in parallel with the new studies carried on this topic.
3. VR implementation - VR implementatation in “can-eye”, for generation of OKN (Optokinetic nystagmus) and it’s monitorisation by Video-nystagmography. The optokinetic response is an involuntary physiological reflexive movement of the eye that occurs in response to moving stimuli such as a rotating drum, or drifting bars on a computer screen. Determining the presence/absence of the optokinetic response is a recognized technique for the subjective assessment of visual function that has been used for both adults and young children (Sangi et al.: OKN Detection Method for Use With Young Children (IEEE J TranslEng Health Med. 2015; 3: 1600110). This is not an objective method for assesing visual acuity like assesment by snellen charts or prefential looking on kay symbols/lea cards but can predict the changes in visual status of the baby if the no coexisting cortical abnormality exists disturbing pathways of OKN. Monitoring OKN is a useful tool for detection of patients with malingering. (Lewkonia I, Br J Ophthalmol. 1969 Sep; 53(9): 641–644) so “can-eye” can serve as an investigative tool in this group of patients with facility of a mobile OKN test. Videonystagmograph may yield cuantitative analysis of OKN in children and can be an easy applicable technique even in children when augmented by VR implementation.
4. Eye tracking functions - Eye tracking is a sensor technology that makes it possible for an electronic system to detect the location of visual attention by examining the pupillary movements of the user. An eye tracker can detect the presence, attention and focus of the user. It facilitates natural user interfaces in a broad range of devices. This technology is mainly important for devices assisting people who are unable to speak or use their hands which can control a computer using their eyes. Eye tracking in “can-eye” can give an idea about child’s visual attention, which can help the physician predict about the changes in neurocognitive status of the child and can be used to monitor effective use of the modules-although it cannot reflect total visual functions literally.
Technologies
Server Prog. Lang. : Javascript (NodeJS), Java (Spring Boot)
Web/Mobil Client: ReactJS(WEB), Swift(IOS), Java(Android)
Comm: Websocket (Socket.io), Webservice(REST), WebRTC
OS: Centos7
Development: İntellijIDEA, xcode, Android Studio, Unity, VR
Management: MS Office
Code Versioning: Git (Bitbucket)
Database: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis Cache, RabbitMQ, Prometheus/Grafana
- A new application of an existing technology
- Audiovisual Media
- Behavioral Technology
- Software and Mobile Applications
- Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality
- 3. Good Health and Well-being
- 4. Quality Education
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Germany
- Turkiye
- Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit
Can-eye project team is composed of the qualified experts. We paid attention to comply with the principle of gender equality in the project team. The project team comprises male and female researchers, engineers, and clinicians. These people took part in the creation, planning and development of the project idea. Likewise, if the proposal is successful, they will work in the project's implementation, market engagement, data collection, analysis, and reporting.
The project has two principal beneficiaries. Children with low vision and their parents. Using the mobile application does not vary depending on gender. We will choose the icons used in the application from the type that we think may be equally interesting for girls and boys. For example, we will use not only cars that attract the attention of boys, or baby figures that attract the attention of girls, but figures such as birds and cats that can attract the attention of both genders. We will determine project participants equally from two genders by simple random sampling method. Considering that each child has two parents, including parents, we will ensure gender equality in terms of participation in parents who are the second beneficiary.
We will analyse the evaluations made before and after the application for girls and boys separately and investigate whether there is a gender difference. In the report and article writing of the project, we will call the participants as “the children with low vision” and we will avoid using gender sensitive language. In this project, we
• provide equal and meaningful opportunities to researchers, participants, and beneficiaries of different genders to be involved
• aim to address the expected benefits of the project on people of different genders
• determine the impact on the relations between people of different genders
• offer relevant outcomes and outputs, with data disaggregated by age and gender
EDI issues: mHealth breaks barriers. Using mHealth does not vary depending on age, gender and race. An expected benefit of the project on diversity and different genders are equal.
We think about usability and user-friendly interface creation to eliminate issues of digital exclusion around EDI and human-centred design settings to be able to use such technology or have access to suitable technology to connect. EDI circumstances will be improved by our platform by including language translation facilitated.The responsibility for measuring and reporting EDI and sustainability issues belongs to Tolga Erol as a company director. UI/UX study with a Human-centric design approach will be led by developer in the team.
We have identified significant markets that will benefit from the development and adoption of the “can-eye” technology. B2B (hospitals, private ophthalmology clinics, NICUs, rehab centers) and B2C (families of children with low vision) are the markets we’re initially targeting which present a large potential for us.
There are nearly 180 Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) in the UK. Initially we aim to target roughly 100 of these at Level II and Level III using them as a channel to interact and engage with parents/children’s families. There are also over 100 UK children’s charities (national and regional levels) that we would focus on engaging with. We want to scale our innovation up with their support. Alongside this, our initial plan includes outreach to children's families initially via social media and family cohorts.
Long-term our B2B focus would extend to insurance companies, charities and rehab centres. We will target insurance companies to deliver this app to their customers in order to reduce health expenditures. We want to communicate with the top 10 UK insurance companies to present our innovation.
We expect to see increased revenue from targeting new customers within the healthcare sector across the UK initially, with USA and developing countries within three years due to shorter pathways to private clinic acceptance. “can-eye” promises significant growth for us in annual turnover, staff hiring, and future R&D.
The NHS could potentially save at least £10 million annually through
can-eye and eliminate treatment of these children's eye care and
decrease clinic utilisation by 10%. Our target of reaching 20,000
families every year they can save 20% on their health expenditures and
improve their mental-health and wellbeing.
- Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)
Inocer has so far proven the user demand for can-eye through a limited
set of functionality trials so far since 2019. Prior to COVID-19, we
launched to over 250 users to test the usability of the functionalities
and extend this to 2000 users so far. During the project we aim to begin
social media advertisements and to beta launch for a limited public
trial.
Inocer expects to see increased revenue from targeting new customers
within the healthcare sector across the UK initially, with USA and
developing countries within three years post-project due to shorter
pathways to private clinic acceptance. The can-eye project promises
significant growth for Inocer in annual turnover, staff hiring, and
future R&D. Annual turnover is projected to increase from
pre-revenue to at least £300k revenue (4,500 standard units) by year
one, £1m revenue (15,000 standard units) by year two, £1.75m (10,000
standard units, 3,000 premium units) by year three, £2.275m (7,500
standard units, 3,000 premium) by year four and £2.9m (5,000 standard,
6,000 premium) by year five. This exponential growth will allow the
staff headcount to expand to at least 20 staff by the end of year five.
This realistic aim for growth will help the company to reinvest more
money in conducting future R&D.
Individual-centered and interactive low vision therapy programs were adversely affected during the COVID-19 pandemic process. To continue the intervention programs, it was inevitable to produce alternative solutions.
We began social media advertisements and to beta launch for a limited public trial.
An annual premium unit license at £500 will be sold post v2 project
with the VR features included. Eventual approvals by the NHS and
international healthcare organisations would remove the financial burden
for families through prescriptions. Our goal is that future successful
clinical trials would result in insurance companies to cover the cost
for families through health insurance policies and charities would be
able to cover the costs for families in need.
can-eye has a potential to both positively impact millions of lives and reach a multi-million enterprise value within 5 years-time. Our technology assists vulnerable and disadvantaged low-vision children. Estimated yearly revenue alone in the UK market is at a minimum £1m in the first two years, as established in questions four and five. Following successful clinical trials and approvals achieved, can-eye could grow our market tenfold by penetrating global markets.
Freedom to Operate:Our product range is fully owned by Inocer, with all rights reserved. As is common with software, our products are covered by local and international copyright protection, rather than patents. We apply the same principle to can-eye and all the commercial software developed under this project. Our employment contracts and NDAs include appropriate clauses to protect the company's IP. We investigated on infringement of third-party IP. There is no possible infringement.