Meet our CODE_n CONTEST Finalists 2016: WearHealth from Germany

The wearables market is set to grow exponentially and has the potential to transform how healthcare services are provided. Wearable devices will soon generate large volumes of medical grade data, but without analysis and insight from health experts, they won’t reach their full potential. That is why our CODE_n CONTEST finalist WearHealth is on a mission to enable personalized mobile preventive health care by bringing together medical wearable technology, artificial intelligence, and health experts. Co-founder and CEO Esteban Bayro Kaiser tells us how this can be achieved:

What is WearHealth all about? How did you come up with the idea?

Esteban:WearHealth is the AI-driven platform that learns from health experts and data from wearables to empower Personal Health Assistance.

We are a research spin-off from the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University Bremen and have years of experience in dealing with data from wearables and machine learning. Due to the increasing shortage in global health workforce and avoidable healthcare costs that are attributed to non-adherence, there is a high demand for new solutions in the area of mobile health. At WearHealth we are building a context-aware personal health assistant (PHA) that is able to learn from health experts and data from wearables.

The first version of the PHA is able to recognize gestures such as pill-intake, eating and smoking with the help of commercially available wearables to support patients with medication adherence. We are working together with our customers the re- and health insurances and pharmaceutical industry to bring this solution to the market.

We founded WearHealth because the wearables market is growing exponentially, healthcare has huge pain points and with our unique machine learning algorithms we want to provide solid solutions for our customers.

Digital Disruption“ – that’s the motto of this year’s CODE_n CONTEST. What makes your solution innovative, what makes it disruptive?

Esteban: Our digital disruption brings the first autonomous and context aware Personal Health Assistant to the market. No one learns better from data from wearables and health experts than our PHA. With our solution we add value to wearables and augment mobile health. We don’t compete with existing mobile health solutions out there; our PHA will add value and reinforce their products for their customers.

You’re one of the 13 finalists in the HealthTech contest cluster. Which challenges do you think young companies have to face in this sector? How do you handle these challenges?

Esteban: It is all about the business model. The challenge is to address and commit the right customers to a scalable solution. In HealthTech the “last man standing” will be those that have the biggest customers on board. That is why we are engaging with them from the first day on to know their biggest pain points and provide them with smart solutions with the help of our unique technology.

We all have heard about Runtastics, Freeletics and so on – and being honest we all have used it at least once. Do you think the big boom of the mobile health apps is still yet to come?

Esteban: Apps like Runtastic and Freeletics are great engagement apps in the area of fitness and are the benchmark for what is to come in mobile health.

Fitness apps are the first step for the future of mobile health. But the next step is truly understanding human’s health with the help of wearables and machine learning to enable personal health assistance.