European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes has awarded prizes to eHealth SMEs from Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland and United Kingdom as part of eHealth Week 2013 in Dublin, Ireland. The winners of the 2nd EU SME eHealth Competition came up with innovations in areas such as improving cognitive behavioural therapy for mental care, improving physiological monitoring, and people facing emergencie. The competition was jointly organised by TICBioMed and the European Commission and the winners were selected from 15 competition finalists.
Neelie Kroes said: "I want to congratulate all the finalists, and the winners in particular. Your inspiring ideas show us how eHealth tools can help patients take control of their health and support doctors and health and care professionals. You have my support, my admiration and my warmest wishes for every success."
The winners:
"Promises" category:
Sense Observation Systems (The Netherlands) developed "Goalie", a context-aware, personal health assistant to improve cognitive behavioural therapy for mental care
Biovotion (Switzerland) offers continuous, non-invasive, wearable concepts for accurate physiological monitoring embedded into mHealth.
BrainControl (Italy) gives disabled people the ability to control objects with their minds.
"Champion" category:
Medisana AG (Germany): VitaDock, a free, medically-certified app for smartphones and tablets to compare blood pressure, blood glucose, weight and temperature data.
Vivago (Finland): VivagoGlobal, personal security system calling for help when the patient cannot, offering preventive care and reduced costs
UK Preventive Medicine (UK) offering The Prevention Plan - A Comprehensive Care Co-Production System
Background
There were a total of 212 applications for the competition. Only European SMEs with less than 150 employees and an annual turnover of less than €5.000.000 were eligible to apply.
The six winners were divided into two groups:
1. "Promise": SMEs with turnover less than 500.000€ (three winners).
2. "Champion": SMEs with turnover above 500.000€ (three winners).
Winners in each group received:
- 1st prize: €1.000 and free tickets for future networking events
- 2nd prize: €500 and free tickets for future networking events
- 3rd prize: free tickets for future networking events.
The other finalists:
"Promise" category
- Cognuse (Estonia) radically improving mental rehabilitation accessibility.
- DNAlytics (Belgium): RheumaKit, an early online diagnostic solution for patients with arthritis.
- Mood Institute (France): an easy-to-use tool to monitor depression and bipolar disorder.
- Saludnova (Spain): home tele-monitoring solutions for multi-pathologic chronic disease patients with real-time detection of alarm situations.
- TedCas Medical Systems (Spain): handling of information in hospital environments, developing touch-free natural user interfaces.
- WINMedical (Italy): a wireless physiological multi-parameter monitoring system designed for general medical wards and home monitoring.
"Champion" category
- C4U Technologies (Denmark): a web-based personal health record and secure messaging system between patient and physician.
- Mediconsult (Finland): Medinet service, providing necessary health status data and engaging users through remote self-reporting and treatment.
- Medisana AG (Germany): VitaDock, a free, medically-certified app for smartphones and tablets to compare blood pressure, blood glucose, weight and temperature data.
- SaludOnNet (Spain): 360º eHealth cloud platform to connect patients, clinics, doctors and health insurance.
eHealth Week
eHealth Week is the largest annual eHealth event in Europe, bringing together industry, academia, government and regional decision-makers from across the EU. EU-funded projects present at the eHealth Week Exhibition include:
- epSOS to allow tourists, business travellers, commuters or exchange students to enjoy seamless access to high quality and safe healthcare abroad by providing health professionals with important medical data of patients in an electronic format. Project experts present at the exhibition give demonstrations on how health professionals can exchange medical information over a web-based portal through Europe.
- Renewing Health (REgioNs of Europea WorkINg together for HEALTH) aims at implementing, validating and evaluating innovative telemedicine solutions within the management of chronic diseases. The project brings together a consortium of nine European regions, where service solutions are operational for tele-monitoring and treatment of patients suffering from diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary and/or cardiovascular diseases. The services give patients a central role in the management of their own diseases: in fine-tuning the choice and dosage of medications, in following and adhering to their treatment, and in helping healthcare professionals to detect early signs of deterioration.
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