E-Carebetics

Currently, there are over 500 million people in the world that have diabetes, and about 30% of them develop diabetic retinopathy, or DR, one of the most common causes of blindness. And over 90% of DR patients live in developing countries. Early diagnosis and treatment can stop the progression and prevent blindness, but people in developing countries are not getting the early diagnosis because of three major problems: Lack of affordable screening tools, lack of access for the patients, and lack of doctors to perform the screening.

The first problem is the high cost of a fundus camera. Taking fundus images is the best way to diagnose DR. However, there is minimal adoption in developing countries due to the cost of a fundus camera. 

The second major problem is patients cannot and will not go to the doctor's office due to location, harsh environment, and the cost of the travel. Approximately 165 million individuals who have vision impairment in India reside in rural regions with little or no access to diagnosis and eye care. The government and NGOs host many medical camps, and traveling nurses go to the villages to conduct essential physical exams. But, without a diagnostic tool and specialty, they still cannot conduct DR screening. 

The third major problem is the shortage of healthcare professionals. India only has one ophthalmologist for every 100,000 people, which is 80% below the recommended ratio of 1:20,000. Also, in the case of diagnosing DR, a diabetologist is the first point of contact for diabetic patients. However, diabetologists cannot perform DR screening due to the lack of training in ophthalmology. And this problem is the same for nurses and medical camp workers. Therefore, more medical professionals need to have ophthalmologists' screening capability to alleviate the screening pressure.

E-Carebtics provides all the healthcare workers, not just eye doctors, the capability to conduct screening for DR using an AI mobile APP with a mobile attached ophthalmoscope. The scope is designed to be compatible with over 95% of the smartphones in the market. The App provides comprehensive data to assist the medical workers in making diagnostic decisions. 

We are targeting diabetologists, neurologists, pedestrians, and traveling nurses to screen diabetic patients quickly, efficiently, and economically at their own facility which will help them screen more patients, reduce the burden on the health system and make more informed diagnoses decisions without waiting for an ophthalmologists review.

We are a team of three engineers (Biomedical Engineer, Electrical Engineer, and Data Engineer). We all came from developing countries (India and China), and we have a strong local network in India. We also have a team of eye doctors and pediatricians to guide us in the clinical settings, and we have a team of industry veterans to mentor us in business development.

We would like to have legal guidance in terms of regulation. We would also like to have a commercialization expert to help us build customer relationships and create go to market and sale strategy.

We are developing a novel illumination technique that lets us use a smartphone’s flashlight as a source to illuminate the retina at different angles. This approach will let us capture a wider field of view of the posterior region of the retina and thus gives us a huge advantage in providing a solution that has no electrical component, and it is compatible with almost 95% of the smartphones on the market, and it is intuitive to use. The only limiting factor for the operation of the smartphone ophthalmoscope is the battery of the smartphone. Our handheld smartphone ophthalmoscope along with our illumination technique and the embedded software captures colored retinal images with similar color profiles and lets the user share those images with us which are geotagged and AI labeled. All our customers have an incentive in the form of the “Share more to Payless” scheme in which the more retinal images you capture using our ophthalmoscope and upload them to our database through our app, the less subscription you will have to pay for that particular month. This will provide us with regional geotagged retinal image datasets which we can use for improving our AI model thus increasing its accuracy in detecting diabetic retinopathy for particular ethnicity and tribe. This solution will significantly improve the scarcity of retinal datasets and will let more research thrive on regional levels that are ongoing for retinal diagnosis. More doctors will be able to get in touch with a specific set of retinal diseases and specific case studies can be documented through a patient's ailments tagged in each image. All the image sharing and storage comes under HIPAA compliance and it is only shared after receiving an individual patient’s consent. Our approach has a potential catalytic effect in reducing the risk of diabetic retinopathy in the coming years via more diagnoses due to greater smartphone and internet penetration in developing countries along with dataset creation, management, and usage for research. It will greatly impact the big data revolution bringing more innovation and research in diagnosis through retinal images, the only non-invasive way to see blood vessels in the human body. 

Our goal for the next year is to obtain certification for our ABS plastic non-electrical smartphone ophthalmoscope and deploy it at Public Health Centers (PHC) and Community Health Centers (CHC) in tier 2 and tier 3 cities of India to conduct more eye fundus screenings. The product will be used by medical professionals comprising endocrinologists, ophthalmologists, neurologists, and traveling nurses in remote locations of India to conduct more retinal screening and identify patients with the severity and progression of diabetic retinopathy thus reducing the time to receive treatment and care for the patient. 

We already partnered with two hospitals in India where we can deploy and test our product. After successful testing in the two hospitals, we will rapidly expand to other hospitals by using the existing network or expanded network built through conferences, publications, etc. 

We have been conducting customer discovery interviews with clinicians and medical professionals from different parts of India, trying to understand their pain points and current screening methodology. Our impact goal is to meet the medical professionals' needs and cater to their pain points thus we are measuring our progress in terms of innovating a solution that is an easy, efficient, and economical solution that provides a wider field of view, and ease of capturing images, frictionless adoption. Also, other metrics include the extra revenue brought to the healthcare organizations through using our solution, and the extra number of patients screened each year using our solution. 

We are looking to speed up the screening process for ocular disease. Based on the feedback from customers about our prototype, they believe it can be very helpful in their daily practice. The solution can help healthcare workers screen much more patients on daily bases due to the shortened process, thus increasing the revenue, and also increasing the revenue from increased treatment for the moderate to severe cases. Overall, the impact is to increase the number of patients screened, increase the number of treatments for those that are screened, increase the revenue stream for the healthcare providers, and reduce the cost for the overall medical system incurred by ocular diseases. 

The core technology is our smartphone-attached non-electrical ophthalmoscope combined with an AI-powered diagnostic software app based on the deep learning CNN model for image classification and pattern recognition.

All of our team members came from developing countries and have lived through poverty in our childhood. Our goal is to eliminate healthcare inequity due to socioeconomic disadvantages. In the future, we are looking to recruit more talent from different socioeconomic backgrounds, gender, and ethnicity to provide the best possible solution for our customers around the world.