The winners were announced at a prestigious gala ceremony at the Royal College of General Practitioners in Central London attended by leading innovators, designers, entrepreneurs and executives from the international health technology sector. The evening was compered by technology journalist and broadcaster Lara Lewington who also delivered a keynote speech on how health technology is changing and impacting our lives, based on her own insights, experience and knowledge as a leading technology journalist.
AXA Health Tech & You is now in its fourth year and is led by AXA PPP healthcare, who have listened to customers to discover health technology that helps with their common and often unmet healthcare needs. This includes solutions to help support mental health in the workplace, health tech that better supports women as they reach the peri-menopause and technologies to motivate people attempting a positive lifestyle change.
For the first time, four of the six categories – the Challenge categories – had a different approach in discovering the finalists and winners: Working with innovation accelerator, The Bakery, the aim was to find innovators that have the potential to partner with AXA PPP healthcare, integrating solutions through its member health and wellbeing programmes.
The other two categories operated in a more traditional way, supported by category partners, allowinginnovators to enter the Awards directly if they met the categories’ criteria. The Innovations in the Early Diagnosis of Dementia category was partnered with Alzheimer’s Research UK and the Women Entrepreneurs in Health Tech category partnered with Collider Health and Our Mobile Health.
The judging approach was tailored to ensure that each winner fulfilled the individual focus of their chosen category supporting specific needs in society. Each judging panel was made up of health experts, representatives from business, as well as journalists and public figures with a specialism in the category criteria. There were a total of 25 prestigious judges across the six categories.
To celebrate this year’s finalists and winners all 18 innovators attended both the Awards evening and a Media Preview earlier in the day, where they had the opportunity to showcase their shortlisted or winning innovation to invited guests and the media.
“It gives us great pleasure to announce the worthy winners of the AXA Health Tech & You Awards 2018. For a fourth year, the programme has continued to discover and showcase the very best in health tech innovation, not just to integrate into our member health and wellbeing programmes, but for the greater good of consumers too.
“The winners and finalists this year show how artificial intelligence is helping consumers tailor their individual health and lifestyle requirements and how wearables are playing an increasing part in monitoring symptoms for health conditions, or helping to prevent these conditions, by encouraging people to stick to their health and fitness goals.
“At AXA PPP healthcare, we are looking forward to working with some of this year’s winning innovators as we continue our restless pursuit to offer the best technology to our customers, giving them better control of their own health.”
[Gordon Henderson, Marketing & Innovation Director, AXA PPP healthcare]
The Winners Are:
Innovations in the Early Diagnosis of Dementia Category
In partnership with Alzheimer’s Research UK, this category aims to identify excellence in design innovation and technology development that can support the diagnosis of diseases underpinning dementia.
- Aparito: A digital health platform that provides wearable devices and disease-specific mobile apps to provide remote patient monitoring outside of the hospital environment. This continued monitoring provides real-time data for clinicians to capture subtle differences in ambulation and sleeping patterns, which can’t be conveyed during short, snapshot clinic visits, in a way that actively supports and enhances diagnosis, treatment and drug development. Aparito is also developing a tool which can measure differences in speech patterns. (www.aparito.com)
- Cognetivity: A 5-minute integrated cognitive assessment (ICA) tool that looks for the earliest signs of impairment by testing the performance of large areas of the brain. The ICA is easy to administer and can learn as it gathers new data to improve its ability to diagnose. As well as having the potential to be a highly effective dementia screening tool, the ICA can also be used for remote monitoring of the progression of diseases and measuring the effectiveness of treatments. (www.cognetivity.com)
Note: Aparito and Cognetivity are joint winners for this category due to the judges agreeing that both innovations equally fulfilled the entry criteria.
Women Entrepreneurs in Health Tech Category
This category aims to support women who are changing the way people think about their health and how to care for others.
- BrightSign: A smart glove which translates sign language to text and speech. BrightSign enables the direct interaction between sign language users and the general public by providing two-way communication which eliminates the need for an accompanying interpreter or family member. It is equipped with machine learning software which allows each user to train the glove to their custom signs and individual variations of the sign language library. BrightSign is paired with an app to enable the user to choose the speech language of the glove (English, French, Arabic, etc.) so it can be used in many countries. (www.brightsignglove.com)
The Mental Health in the Workplace Challenge
This category has an objective to better support employees’ mental wellbeing and is looking for solutions that can monitor day-to-day behaviours and flag up early signs of mental health conditions.
- Emoquo: An app for employees that gives them personalised digital coaching to deal with common issues like being micro-managed, being undermined, moaning and gossiping as well as bullying and harassment. The app digitally replicates a coaching session using coaching questions, prompts and self-reflection techniques, giving you personalised and contextual guidance, based on input from over 25 coaches and therapists, about how to deal with your particular challenge. Data from the app provides management with a real-time heat map, revealing insights into the issues employees are seeking advice on and, therefore, where the 'hot spots’ are. This allows managers to make proactive interventions at a group or division level, improve the culture and increase the emotional and mental wellbeing of their workforce. (www.emoquo.com)
The Coaching Challenge
This category aims to discover technologies and solutions that can deliver an engaging experience to people who are attempting a lifestyle change and to motivate them to keep to their goals.
- Meal IQ: A meal planning app that uses artificial intelligence to help users search, plan and shop for meals suited to individual budgets, food intolerances, macro nutrient targets and taste preferences. Meal IQ automatically adds them to your online grocery shopping basket. (www.getmealiq.com)
Staying Independent with Tech Challenge
This category aims to find technologies which can help monitor and subsequently alert (in case of emergency) a caregiver when one of their users is in distress.
- Techsixtyfour - My Gator Watch: My Gator Watch is a wearable mobile phone and tracker made for the elderly and children which can be used almost anywhere in the world. The device looks like a modern but simple watch which can make and receive calls to and from up to 13 trusted numbers. It can also track users with both GPS outdoors and WiFi indoors, connect to multiple networks in most countries and weighs in at only 40g. The device is splash proof and has a 4-day standby battery life. Techsixtyfour provides 24/7 customer assistance to My Gator Watch users in case of network or watch faults. (www.mygatorwatch.com)
The Peri-Menopause Challenge
This category aims to find technologies which help give women better control, enabling women to easily track symptoms of peri-menopause, with relevant clinically-validated hormone levels, so they can better understand their experience and can get appropriate support and information.
- Grace: A bracelet that automatically fends off menopausal hot flushes. Designed to be worn day and night, Grace could help in solving one of the most common menopausal symptoms for millions of women worldwide. Using an array of sensors, Grace automatically identifies the onset of a hot flush. At this point, a cooling tile is activated aiming to reverse the effects of a flush. Grace is paired with a smartphone app which allows users to view patterns and trends associated with their symptoms. (www.gracecooling.com)
For more information on this year’s winners and the AXA Health Tech & You Awards programme, visit www.healthtechandyou.com
ABOUT AXA HEALTH TECH & YOU AWARDS 2018
There are six categories for the Health Tech & You Awards 2018. Each has a distinct focus from identifying health tech that can support specific needs in society, detecting and diagnosing early signs of disease or a condition and helping individuals and workplaces make positive changes in their lifestyle. It aims to identify individual champions, innovators and organisations that are creating exciting and pioneering health tech to help people live life well.