Every patient’s nightmare is putting one’s health at risk by receiving a failed surgery. In the US, medical errors kill more than 200,000 patients per year, making it the third-leading cause of death. The avoidable morbidity is partially due to lack of vigilance from manual counting and tracking of surgical instruments. Time-consuming and error-prone, the current tracking procedures jeopardize patient safety by replacing time that should be spent on patient care with time accounting for surgical instruments. VIDI builds smart systems that leverage computer vision to increase hospital workflow efficiency and minimize medical errors by tracking the full spectrum of surgical tools, enhancing inter-department and multi-room collaboration, and seamlessly generating documentation and analyses for hospital staff.
Year: 2018
Innovis Medical
Trauma disrupts every person’s blood clotting ability to stop bleeding and remains the second leading cause of preventable death in industrialized countries. With no effective medical device to provide physicians with full blood clotting data at the site of injury, medics resort to blind dosing that carries significant risk of internal blood clotting or having no effect altogether. While deployed, injured soldiers may not receive proper treatment for up to 24 hours. In the civilian sector, patient treatment may be delayed up to 3 hours before the data can be obtained at a hospital. At Innovis Medical, the team provides health care practitioners with the tools they need to diagnose clotting dysfunction at the point-of-care with a solid-state, disposable sensor capable of operating in mobile situations.
Codi
In the US, 1 in 4 renters spend half their income on rent. City life has become increasingly unaffordable while residential spaces remain empty during the day. Meanwhile, technology is disrupting the traditional work structure leading to ever more freelancers and remote workers. The demand for flexible workspaces during the day is soaring, as expensive co-working spaces and crowded coffee shops mushroom in cities. Codi addresses the mismatch between unused residences and need for workspace. Based on a sharing-economy model, Codi allows anyone, anywhere, to run their own co-working space at home. Codi provides the first micro-rental platform of residential spaces for remote workers. Members can access reliable home offices with the amenities, the comfort and the social component they need to thrive, while creating an additional source of revenue for hosts. The Codi model promotes circular economic values and revitalizes local neighborhoods.
Acarí
Acarí takes the hated and feared invasive armored catfish or ‘devil fish’ as it is colloquially known in Mexico and transforms it into tasty, nutritious food products to increase employment in rural fishing communities and provide a healthy, sustainable alternative to beef jerky. To Acarí, the devil fish is much more than an invasive ‘trash fish’; it is an opportunity to improve the livelihoods of marginalized fishermen across Mexico. Though the devil fish has perplexed politicians and development professionals for nearly two decades, Acarí considers it to be a marketing problem first and foremost and has begun to develop the sales channels and supply chain to effectively transform the devil fish from plague to a protein-packed snack that makes their customers say, “Quiero más.”
Loo Lab
In rapidly urbanizing areas, small exhauster truck businesses are unable to keep up with the demand for pit latrine emptying services due to inefficiencies in their operations. Thus, when a latrine fills in most low-income urban areas, manual emptiers use buckets to empty the waste and dump it in the environment. This results in high rates of diseases such as cholera and dysentery. Loo Lab enables exhauster trucks to grow their businesses by improving the efficiency and profitability of their daily operations. Loo Lab’s integrated suite of technologies connects truckers to customers, intelligently routes truckers to clusters of customers, and streamlines payments for emptying services. The technology allows individual trucks to save time and money. This makes it possible for exhauster trucks to expand their customer base, empty more low income customers, and prevent waste from being dumped in the environment.
Lumenda
In developing countries, the cost to diagnose meningitis remains high and therefore many neonates are denied quality healthcare. Approximately 126,000 cases of neonatal bacterial meningitis occur every year in low income countries of which 25–50% develop brain damage and about 40-58% of patients die. The gold standard for diagnosing neonatal bacterial meningitis is a cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) culture. Lumenda provides an accurate and rapid method of diagnosing bacterial meningitis in neonates in low-resource settings. It facilitates rapid intervention and avoids wasteful prophylactic administration of antibiotics by analyzing the optical properties of the CSF to rapidly detect bacterial meningitis at each point along this pathophysiology. The rationale behind the device stems from the clinical observation that CSF turns from clear to opaque when infected with bacterial meningitis.