Lifelight

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death globally and hypertension is the key indicator for CVD. According to the World Health Organisation, with over 1.3 billion people suffering from hypertension and less than 25% actively managing their blood pressure, even with advanced medical provision in countries like the UK, its government has estimated an annual cost to the national health system and wider society to be approximately US$28.5b (£23b). 

The key problem is that existing solutions are cumbersome. Detection is low, requiring a visit to a clinician; home monitoring is difficult, needing specialist hardware and training. Furthermore, majority of the world's population lives in countries with limited medical provision, even the cheapest diagnostics cuffs are unaffordable, and the communities most in need are spread across remote locations. 

One device is ubiquitous across many societies - smartphone. Lifelight, powered by our proprietary AI and cloud infrastructure, can be rapidly deployed to any smartphone or tablet. It requires no training, no calibration, to provide an accurate measurement of the multiple vital signs simply by having an individual look into the camera for 40 seconds. It is a life-changing solution for early detection and easy self-monitoring.

Lifelight works by capturing and processing the reflected light/rPPG signal received from the face and makes vital signs predictions. The process starts with the light that first penetrates the skin and reflects off blood vessels in the hypodermis, which are capture by the smartphone camera. These are then processed, first by extracting the ambient noise signals, with the remaining signal being analysed by our proprietary AI. We train our explainable AI to make predictions based on physiological features and as such, the accuracy of our predictions are not biased by the gender, skin colour, believes, etc.  

Lifelight is the World’s only clinically validated and regulated vital signs solution targeted at hypertension. 

We also benefit from many ESG advantages for being a Software-as-a-Medical Device (SaMD). From significant reduction of plastic and electronic waste to low cost scale deployment in remote location and low income countries. Furthermore our product has been tested on all skin tones and does not exhibit accuracy bias.

Out solution can serve every person on the planet. Starting with those most in need - hypertension suffers. Most of these individuals are unaware of their condition and risk developing CVD. By helping diagnoses these individual with an intuitive and convenient solution, we hope the significantly improve to quality of life years most people can enjoy. Our solution is equally applicable to advanced economies and developing economies, addressing different risks and needs of each country.

E.g., The UK - diet and lifestyle, significant increases the risk of CVD. Large proportion of the adult population are at risk of CVD. Even though there is a national health service available, current diagnosis rate is low and monitoring is even poorer. Our solution can help digitise current diagnostic pathway to make it easier identify suffers and help manage their condition.

Japan - where diet and lifestyle is typically considered the opposite of the UK. However their society is aging quickly, compound this with the spread of their communities, managing a healthy old age population is difficult. Lifelight can help augment the remote health monitoring solution. 

India - with a mix of urban and rural populations. Health inequality is extremely high. Even though healthcare is often inexpensive but access to quality care is not always available. Lifelight has the potential to rebalance this inequality by providing useful metrics to help clinicians make better decisions remotely.  

Our solution was trained on and validated across the whole range of hypotensive to very high hypertensives, giving us additional clinical utilities by not only focused on hypertensives. We are also tested across all skin tones, ensuring we do not create another sort of health inequality by being less accurate on certain population. 

In addition as a software solution, we can continue our research to improve accuracy and widen the scope. We have recently completed a paediatric data collection study and will soon embark on a neonatal study - helping very sick new borns, with very fragile skin, whom clinicians have to weigh up the benefit vs suffering of additional monitors. Afib, blood glucose, and other interconnecting vital signs will soon be added to our solution following successful research, further additional clinical benefit to everyone using Lifelight.

UK is uniquely positioned to deliver this clinically regulated solution because we combine:

i) the technological know-how (with an excellent science and engineering teams with a proven track record of translating research into product);

ii) the clinical infrastructure (for our research, we are able to conduct ethnically approved clinical trials and data collections through the NHS, with a diverse population across different ethnicity and socioeconomic groups. From a commercial perspective, a strong UK/Europe based MedTech ecosystem as an early adopter and collaborator of novel technologies, complemented by the NHS serving as a key validator); and

iii) the funding (specifically on high risk, clinical focus, grant bodies such as InnovateUK and NIHR, that can help push the boundaries of scientific possibilities. Later, private capital can help scale the commercial operation. Partly because much of our research receives government support, diversity and patient involvement are key requirements - enabling us to get first hand feedback and inputs to help develop our solution). 

By developing our technology within the UK, we are, and can continue to be, a credible, regulated medical technology platform that is trust by both clinicians and patients. 

We have deployed in a number of NHS pilots and is live with a commercial partner. We have received both non-dilutive funding from government and from private individuals. We are currently in the process of raising institutional investments to continue our accuracy and usability development journey. We are in discussion with a number of national health services to explore deployment partnerships, which will help both financially and in term of design iteration and localisation for different communities.

The key is to help break down market barriers and show case the possibility of this novel technology. With our accuracy is being independently validated by CE and other regulatory bodies, healthcare and insurance customers remain sceptical of adopting the unknown, preferring the plastic cuff despite its many drawbacks. With Sovle's help, we believe this will validate our vision that Lifelight is a ubiquitous and beneficial medical technology for all. Whilst no individual "pays" to have they blood pressure measured themselves, the visibility Solve will generate can help bring the "payers and payees" to the discussion able, connection governments, healthcare providers, insurers, and patients together to explore the shared value created. 

Without Solve, Lifelight will have to persuade each commercial partner individually that this is Smartphone's "wearable moment", where our heart rate and other biometrics have significant value that no one has paid for. This is an opportunity to kickstart the preventive healthcare that will not only save money but add significant quality of life to every person involved. 

Our solution was designed with scale in mind. Most people in the world do not have access to quality healthcare but they most likely have access to a smartphone. By designing our solution as a Software-as-a-Medical Device, we can easily deploy our algorithm to anyone who needs it. It also benefit from continuous improvements. Unlike our competitors, we have collected our own proprietary training data, with the aim to become the world's first CE Class IIa regulated medical device for contactless blood pressure monitoring. Being clinical first, rather than wellness, is critical to our success. In order to gain trust and adoption from patients and medical professional, we believe it is paramount that our accuracy and unbiased solution have to be demonstrable and this is why we have published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles to ensure transparency, instead of scale fast and fail. 

We have first hand data showing improved adherence and habit. 

From our commercial partnership, we see over 40% of users are repeat users. The current arrangement means that the platform provider pays rather than the end user. But this validates both i) value/utility and ii) stickiness of our solution for vital signs that previously had no monetary or attributable value. 

From our conversation with the NHS's digital health check team, we understand that over 60% of those who responded to the online health check questionnaire fail to complete the final stage by going to a pharmacy or health clinic to have their vitals measured, leading to significant waste. Our solution has the potential to complete digitise the digital health check journey. 

Our neonatal collaboration was a direct approach from a hospital clinician looking for solutions to avoid specific damages to the baby's skin. A similar use case is being explored with pregnant women to address the risk of gestational hypertension. 

A number of Telehealth platforms have shared with us the same vision to minimise operational barriers with physical equipment. 

The longer term aim is to become commercially and financially stable such that the company is free to explore low cost/no cost philanthropic opportunities. 

Currently our early metric will be on the number of hypertension diagnosed. Hypertension is a leading indicator for CVD, which causes significant financial and personal loss. With early diagnosis, this can help prevent or delay the onset of CVD. 

Over time, we will want to be able to measure "lives assisted", as we expand our scope to help monitor cardiovascular performance, for both high risk individuals as well as CVD sufferers. Also, we would also want to measure the amount of plastic and electronic waste reduced as a direct result of our software solutions vs hardware produOur corection. 

Our core technologies are i) rPPG combined with ii) signal processing techniques, and iii) big data/machine learning. 

rPPG science enable us to capture individual health information. With our signal process techniques, we are able to separate physiological information from ambiance noise. Improvement in this will help overcome the challenges from movements, low lighting conditions, etc, by ensuring we will have quality signal over the course of <40 seconds. Finally a robust and inclusive training data set and algorithm meant that we are able to make feature-determined AI predictions rather than generating a population average result. 

Full time - 11

Part time - 6 

Contractors - 4

6 years

Leadership team - 3 men, including 1 identifying as LGBTQ+

Senior team - includes 1 black and 1 Chineses

M/F - 65%/35%

5 PhDs (2M, 3F), 5 Masters, 6 Bachelors, 5 non-degree