Irish start-ups bag €150,000 for at-home Covid-19 monitoring platform

17 Sep 2020

Image: © Jo Gtz/Stock.adobe.com

A consortium led by Think Biosolution has won a €150,000 grant to develop a platform for monitoring and triaging Covid-19 remotely.

A project including two Irish start-ups has been funded under the latest EU Digi-B-Cube funding round, an initiative that aims to accelerate the use of digital technologies for medical diagnostics.

The consortium, led by Dublin-based Think Biosolution, has been awarded a €150,000 grant to further develop its remote monitoring platform for Covid-19 patients. The at-home monitoring system includes an app to allow patients and next of kin to access the former’s health information in real time, collected using a wireless blood-oxygen-level reader worn on a fingertip.

Think Biosolution said that it also includes a clinical dashboard with a built-in triaging system to help a doctor remotely prioritise hospital admissions and reduce doctor-patient interaction time.

Other members of the consortium include Dublin-based Wellola, Chino.io from Italy and Synyo from Austria. In total, 217 applications from 470 companies across 34 countries were received under the latest EU Digi-B-Cube call, with nine receiving up to €150,000 in funding and eight receiving up to €60,000.

‘Enormous clinical and economic benefit’

Dr Shourjya Sanyal, CEO of Think Biosolution, said: “This Digi-B-Cube funding will be instrumental for us to launch our Covid-19 platform in the EU from a regulatory framework.

“Our strong consortium of partners will ensure that our platform is regulatory compliant as well as delivers value in terms of patient adherence and early warning score to at-home Covid-19 patients.”

Sonia Neary, managing director of Wellola, added that the project “has the potential to deliver enormous clinical and economic benefit in multiple healthcare settings on a global scale”.

In 2018, Think Biosolution was awarded $250,000 as one of four companies to win the first round of that year’s Luminate NY, one of the world’s largest optical and photonics accelerators. In addition to its Dublin base, the start-up has an office in Rochester, New York.

The company’s QuasaR device allows users to monitor up to seven different health and fitness parameters using a wearable activity tracker.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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