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 REPORT

assistive tech

MiMi

 MiMi is a Berlin-based startup that

offers smartphone-based hearing

tests and hearing amplification for

 people with hearing loss.

How many people are using

Mimi today and what are your

growth plans?

From the 360 million people

 worldwide that suffer from hearing

problems, only 15 million are

currently served by existing tech.

 Within the next five years, we are

aiming to double this number. We

have reached 80,000 downloads

across our apps with organic traffic.

 We’re just getting started now with

active marketing campaigns.

 Are you excited about

the assistive tech space?

 What I find exciting is that while

traditional medical research,

genetics and pharmaceutics are trying

to find a cure, startups are building

solutions using existing technologies

and making the life of many easier

now. And we are succeeding.

 What’s next for Mimi?

There is a stigma around hearing loss

 where many people are afraid to even

talk about it. We’re trying to fight that

 with educational campaigns, such as

the one we’re going to launch in the

summer – hearing1million – which

aims to test the hearing of 1 million

people worldwide.

Tech-wise we’ll continue improving

our apps to ease the worry of people

 with hearing loss, and help them

through their daily life. We’re also

 working on hardware.

 Philipp Skribanowitz is a

co-founder and CEO of MiMi

See What I Mean

 See What I Mean (SWiM) is an app

that instantly translates words into

 pictures, found to be effective at

stimulating memories, and improving

communication, mood and levels of

engagement amongst people with

dementia. It was originally created

by Ilyanna Kerr in the final year

of her design degree at Goldsmiths

University.

 What’s the need you’re

addressing?

For people living with dementia,

 words can become increasingly hard tounderstand, making communication

and social interaction difficult.

Images, on the other hand, can retain

their meaning long after the sense of

a word has been lost. With the SWiM

app, conversation is not limited to the

hard copy images you have to hand

and it’s not slowed down by searching

for images on the internet. The ease

of use and instant translation of word

to image encourages a natural flow to

conversation. Images can be saved and

personal images uploaded, creating a

familiar and meaningful collection.

How many people are using See

 What I Mean today and what are

 your growth plans?

Our main customer is Jewish Care,

a health and social care organisation

that cares for over 7000 people in the

UK. We worked with them to develop

the app and we are now working to

scale its use to more of their centres

and to other care providers. We are

currently working on a version of the

app for family members and carers

of people living with dementia to use

at home called SWiM Personal which

 will be available first on iOS for iPad.

 Are you excited about

the assistive tech space?

Even though we are excited about the

huge potential assistive tech has to

impact people’s lives we are concerned

about the current barriers that mean

these innovations are not reaching the

people that really need them. This is a

complex issue that requires the entire

health and social care system, both

private and public, to ensure people

THE REAL LIFE HACKERS

THE STARTUPS TAKING TECH TO THE PEOPLE WHO NEED IT MOST

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 REPORT

assistive tech

can benefit from these innovations.

There’s no point in continuing to

throw money at innovations in this

space if they can’t benefit the people

they were intended for.

 Ilyanna Kerr is a co-founder of

 See What I Mean

Sentimoto

 Sentimoto was founded in December

2013 by a team of four Oxford

biomedical engineers to develop

new wearable lifestyle management

technologies for older people’s

care. The team is currently preparing

a mobile and wearable app for a

 public release.

 What’s the need you’re

addressing?

By tracking lifestyle information and

 beginning to quantify care, problems

can be spotted earlier and care can be

delivered when it is needed. This not

only benefits the care recipients by

encouraging healthy behaviours and

directly preventing adverse incidentsand disease, but also helps reduce

respite admissions for carers and

helps care service providers improve

and validate their practices.

 

 Are you excited about

the assistive tech space?

It is huge. We are facing a revolution

now, with rapidly increasing

numbers of older people using mobile

technologies, and the ‘quantified

self-approach’ is finally finding a

meaningful application in caring for

others.

 

 What’s next for Sentimoto? We are in stealth mode at the

moment, validating our solution with

users with the support of Nominet

Trust and Wayra UnLtd, and

preparing for a public release later

this year.

 We are working with third party

 wearable devices, so supporting as

many as possible is essential, to give

our users a complete freedom of

choice.

 Maxim Osipov is a co-founder of

 Sentimoto

Andiamo

 Andiamo combines 3D scanning,

3D printing and predictive analytics

to build custom orthotics like back

 braces and ankle foot orthoses,

reducing waiting times from six

months to 48 hours.

 What’s the need you’re

addressing?

There are two core problems. The first

is that our capacity to produce custom

orthotics is declining globally. There

are only 400 qualified orthotists left in

the UK seeing 2 million NHS patients.

 Worldwide there are approximately

100 million people that need an

orthotic per year, yet only a fraction

get them.

Secondly, the evidence about

 what does and doesn’t work isn’t

recorded because everything is hand

measured and hand made. As we use

3D scanning and are a fully digitalservice, we’re able to track exactly

how a condition is progressing and if

their orthotic is working. We’ll have

the first ever data set that shows how

children grow and how their condition

changes over time.

How many people are using

 Andiamo and what are your

growth plans?

Our first three families started this

 year and we have another five joining

next month.

 We are prototyping the service and

products for the next 12 to 18 months

 before we open our first clinic in2016. We will have our first hospital

trial within nine months and our first

health service contract within the next

two years. Our goal is to be able to

reach every single person globally that

needs a custom orthotic within one

 week of their need.

 Are you excited about the

assistive tech space?

Extremely. We’ve been talking about

mass customisation for a while

now but the truth is that the actual

improvement for a large chunk of the

population is minimal.

Long-term conditions and

disabilities, however, tend to manifest

in very specific ways that mean mass

customisation is absolutely critical to

quality of life.

Looking at the most recent WHO

figures, about 10% of the world’s

population already needs assistive

tech and that is only going to increase.

It is imperative to improve this area, bring down cost, increase access, and

 build the infrastructure for true mass

customisation.

The key thing?

Empathy. Customisation without an

infrastructure of empathy is at best

short-term bling.

 Naveed Parvez is a co-founder

and CEO of Andiamo

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