Challenges and Solutions
As one of its main challenges, the European Union is facing demographic change. Part of this development is caused by a continuously aging population. This trend implies different challenges, especially for the medical and healthcare sector. With rising age, the expectation of joint problems increases. Additionally, sports’ injuries generate different cases of arthroscopy as well.
After surgeries, patients need to pass a rehabilitation process to strengthen muscles and regain their mobility. During this rehabilitation, patients have to exercise at home where they cannot be observed by medical staff. For monitoring the rehabilitation after knee arthroscopy, the German-Serbian software SME Nissatech Innovation Center developed a way to remotely monitor the progress. Based on the progress the patient makes, the rehabilitation program can be adapted and personalized.
Together with the Irish research organization Tyndall, Nissatech encouraged the concept of a smart knee. The jointly developed demonstrator monitors the recovery after a knee arthroscopy. This is done by a knee movement sensor called SMART KNEE which monitors how successfully the patient has followed the instructions of the doctor. The generated data will be processed locally as well as globally to define the success of the whole rehabilitation process.
Gateone Support
Nissatech is a software company based both in Germany and Serbia with the software development team located in Serbia. They are a technology provider for mobile data processing, complex event processing (CEP) and real-time big data analytics.
Being solely a software company, Nissatech relies on existing hardware to develop its service. There are, however, almost no open source products that deliver high quality data and access to the system for connectivity to the SaaS.
The gateone-project provides a great opportunity for Nissatech to focus on one specific area and develop recurring revenue on their SaaS model. It also supports this transition from a sole R&D company to a commercial company.
TYNDALL has developed a strong competency in the use Inertial Motion Units for gesture monitoring especially in Healthcare, sports and wellbeing. The research organization delivers an open source system that can be directly used by Nissatech.
Impact/What’s next
The demonstrator permits the company to sample products to develop its market. Budapest Hospital will be involved in the testing phase in order to start the validation approach.
Providing software for the rehabilitation market is a service with low commercial competition for now.
Tyndall officially handed over the demonstrator to Nissatech during the IoT Planet 2016 in Grenoble. This trade fair gathered international key players in the area of Internet of Things. The gateone-project was present at the Smart Anything Everywhere booth.
