Newsletter #21

NOVEMBER 2023

The Patient Innovation Awards are back for a 5th edition!

Since the last newsletter a lot has happened at Patient Innovation! Here are some of the highlights.

• 5th PATIENT INNOVATION AWARDS

This year Patient Innovation awarded 5 different innovative projects in 3 categories during an award ceremony that took place at the Estoril Conferences at Nova School of Business and Economics' (Nova SBE) campus on September 2nd, 2023.

The Patient Innovation (PI) Awards are awards given with the objective of honoring all patients, caregivers, and collaborators who have developed innovative solutions to cope with the challenges of their health condition, to help others they care about, or in some cases, people they don't even know. Thus, Patient Innovation gave awards in 3 categories: Patient Innovator, Caregiver Innovator and Collaborator Innovator.

The 5 winners of this year's edition were chosen from among the 1800 solutions available on the Patient Innovation platform. The 5 projects chosen this year are very diverse not only in terms of their country of origin, but also in the type of solution they created: the winners came from Spain, Portugal, India, the United States of America and Poland, with solutions that range from medical devices to mobile applications.

In the category "Patient Innovator", Adriana Mallozzi from Puffin Innovations, and Konrad Zielinski from Uhura Bionics were the two awarded projects. Jaume Puig and Constanza Lucero from Biel Glasses, and Francisco Nogueira and Frederico Stock from Glooma (Sense Glove) were the two awarded projects in the "Caregiver Innovator" category. And finally, Akshita Sachdeva and Bonny Dave from Trestle Labs (Kibo) received the "Collaborator Innovator" award.

• Adriana Mallozzi from Puffin Innovations

Adriana Mallozzi was born with cerebral palsy and was first introduced to a power wheelchair, covered with unique technologies, at age 9. She is the founder of the Puffin Innovations team who created a Bluetooth-connected device fit for phones, that people with disabilities can control with their mouth, allowing them greater access to computers and mobile phones. Puffin empowers people with disabilities to connect wirelessly to mobile devices, computers & anything smart.

• Konrad Zielinski from Uhura Bionics

A couple years ago Konrad lost his larynx due to cancer and was unable to find a convenient solution to regain his natural voice back. So, he started the Uhura Bionics team, to help him design the relevant technology to restore the natural communication of laryngectomees with the use of smart interfaces, turning the robotic sound of the current artificial larynxes into a natural-sounding voice.

• Jaume Puig and Constanza Lucero from Biel Glasses

Constanza Lucero is a medical doctor and Jaume Puig is an Electronics Engineer, and they are the of parents of Biel, a child born with low vision. This is how Biel Glasses was created! The glasses capture the user's visual field, and through a processor, an algorithm examines the information to return signals to the display module. Then, the display module adapts the image to the patient's residual vision of the patient, indicating obstacles and other elements through various graphic signals that the user is able to perceive.

• Francisco Nogueira and Frederico Stock from Glooma (Sense Glove)

Glooma’s story started when Francisco’s cousin detected a lump in her chest and disregarded its importance. Four months later, she went to the doctor and the tumor was diagnosed malignant, leading to the breast's removal. Combining Francisco and Frederico’s knowledge, they co-created SenseGlove, a home and portable medical screening device that assists women in breast self-examination. This device is a glove that, with the help of sensors, detects and controls abnormalities in the breast tissue contributing to the early detection of breast cancer, taking women earlier to the doctor and preventing death or aggressive treatments.

• Akshita Sachdeva and Bonny Dave from Trestle Labs (Kibo)

After finishing his Bachelor’s degree, Bonny Dave also started working as a Social Innovator at Digital Impact Square, where he met Akshita. In 2017, they co-founded Trestle Labs, by combining their knowledge and interests, to keep working with communities of visually impaired people and helping them to pursue their education. Their first project was developing ‘Kibo’, a device to help the visually impaired access written content, by making anything that is printed accessible to audio by digitalizing it, allowing visually impaired people to listen to any book, letter or even handwritten notes.

• 4th PATIENT INNOVATION BOOTCAMP

And just like that, another edition of the Patient Innovation Bootcamp comes to an end!

This year, Patient Innovation held the 4th edition of the PI Bootcamp with 12 participating teams with representatives from 8 European countries. Over the last 4 months, the 12 teams worked and further developed their solutions over three working weeks.

The Patient Innovation Bootcamp is an acceleration program aimed at supporting patients, informal caregivers, and collaborators to implement and scale up the innovative solutions they developed to help them cope with a need imposed by their health condition.

The first week of the Bootcamp was hosted in Lisbon, at the Nova SBE's campus, where the teams got the opportunity to meet each other and network face-to-face with the incredible panel of mentors, speakers, and experts. The first week was focused on the developing and validation aspects and was organized by Patient Innovation in partnership with Nova SBE and Nova Medical School.

The following week of hands-on work took place online “in Barcelona” (online) with our partners IESE Business School and Biocat, that supported the teams in their business model design.

The final week in-person happened in Copenhagen at our partner Copenhagen Business School's (CBS) campus (activity leader), where they focused on helping the teams consolidate, implement and diffuse their projects.

On the last in person day of the Bootcamp in Copenhagen, all the teams participated in the Demoday pitch competition. After all the teams presented their solution in 5 minutes, the MSc students from the Innovation in Healthcare MSc program at CBS acted as the jury of the demo day.

Congrats to the eBreathie team for being the first Portuguese team to ever win the Patient Innovation Bootcamp Demoday! They received the award from Nikolaj Malchow-Møller, the President of CBS. As Demoday winners, the eBreathie team will represent the Patient Innovation Bootcamp's teams in the EIT Health Career Path Event in Barcelona by the end of November.

After the completion of the 4th edition of the Patient Innovation Bootcamp, we are happy that the group of Patient Innovation Bootcamp Alumni continues to grow, and we can now count 44 supported startups and 77 entrepreneurs.

• NOVA SBE’s NEW DEAN

We are thrilled that Pedro Oliveira, the co-founder and co-leader of Patient Innovation (among many other things) was elected over this last year as the new Dean of Nova School of Business and Economics of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa until Dec 2026. Many congratulations to Pedro and we wish him all the best at Nova School of Business and Economics!

• INTERNSHIPS

This year, Patient Innovation had the pleasure of welcoming three interns.

Hugo Morais is a 6th-year Medical Student at Nova Medical School, who joined the team in May as part of his PIATI (Programa de Integração de Alunos em Trabalhos de Investigação) internship in which he helped us redesign and better organize our back office.

Luis Correia joined the Patient team in July and is currently getting his Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Technology from Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal. He spent a few months with us as part of his ANEEB (Associação Nacional de Estudantes de Engenharia Biomédica) internship, in which he helped us find and write new solutions for our website, while also helping with the back office data management.

Maria Coutinho is finishing her Bachelor's in Biomedical and Biophysics Engineering from Universidade de Lisboa. During her course, she developed knowledge in several areas, from health to technology and medical physics. Maria is helping us redesign and better organize our back office data, as well as help us publish more solutions on the platform.

• PROJECTS
  • HealthEConnect

HealthEConnect is a project funded by the European Commission with the objective is to strengthen the cooperation between two innovation ecosystems: the health tech innovation ecosystem of the Lisbon and Vale de Tejo region in Portugal (a moderate innovator region in the EU), and the health tech innovation ecosystem of Hovedstaden in Denmark (an innovation leader region in the EU), to support the rise and growth of next-generation health tech companies through a co-designed, user-centered and entrepreneurial-driven health tech innovation and entrepreneurship educational offer. As a pilot, the project consortium created a specialization in ‘healthcare innovation’ within the Masters Impact Entrepreneurship & Innovation from Nova School of Business and Economics.

One of the initiatives powered by HealthEConnect was the the course "Health Innovation: From Ideas to Impact", an initiative by Nova Medical School, Nova School of Business and Economics and Patient Innovation, which took place from September 13-15th, 2023. The 3-day courses had amazing speakers including Eric von Hippel, Helena Canhão, Pedro Oliveira, João Nabais, Vera Raposo, Maria João Jacinto, Bebiana Moura, Tiago Godinho, Lúcia Domingues and João Conde. The course participants included medical students, clinical doctors, healthcare workers, health tech innovators, entrepreneurs, patient representatives and faculty, as well as Master students from the Impact Entrepreneurship and Innovation program from Nova School of Business and Economics.

The HealthEConnect project also recently organized the "From Ideas to Impact: Navigating Digital Health Innovation" webinar, which was held last week by Dr. Devin Mann, a Professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Strategic Director at NYU Langone Health. Dr. Mann discussed NYU's digital health innovations in RPM, Generative AI, and their impact on patient care and practitioner support. The webinar was hosted by Anne-Laure Fayard, member of the Open & User Innovation Knowledge Center and academic director of the Master in impact Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Nova SBE.

Finally, the lunch with Sword Health - the first Portuguese 'Unicorn' in healthcare that aims to become a reference Digital Health Company to free 2 billion people from pain by providing safe, reliable, and effective technology to treat pain and keep people active - is also an initiative of the HealthEConnect project. During the lunch, the participants will learn from Susana Afonso and Catarina Gracias about how this idea was born in Portugal and became a global company, but also how a day at Sword looks like, and how each innovative project they do has a direct impact on the lives of thousands of people.

• Citizens4Health

The FCT’s Citizens4Health ongoing project focuses on healthcare and investigates the factors that influence the decision of patient/caregiver innovators to develop their own ventures and become entrepreneurs. The project Citizens4Heatlh has the ambition to build a resilient, bottom-up, crowd-based, and high-impact system of innovation that can help address emerging health-related needs.

• Project “Releasing the Power of Users”

The project “Releasing the Power of Users - articulating user interest to accelerate new innovative pathways in the digital health and welfare sector” is a project focusing on the health care sector and how to amplify the voice of the users when applying new digital technology.

The project consortium met in the past September in Stavanger, where it was explored the opportunity to discuss the project outcomes, which includes a book, and present the project partners to University of Stavanger stakeholders.

The Patient Innovation team wishes safe and happy Holidays to all, with hopes for a brighter New Year!

• OUR SUPPORTERS