Tech Talks Central

Thanos Stavropoulos, CEO & Co-Founder at Carealia, a spinoff of Dem@Care, a FP7 European funded project. Thanos explains how they worked together with IBM, Philips and several European clinics to build a smart home monitoring system to assist in the care of dementia. Interconnected devices such as retail wearables, ambient sensors and security solutions installed in a smart home, are combined with intelligent algorithms and clinical knowledge to produce insights and support doctors to assess efficiently and remotely patients’ symptoms and behavioural patterns. They are actively looking for early adopters and customers to deploy their smart monitoring system thus they are focusing on nursing homes. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Alex Itsios, Team Manager and Konstantinos Koliousis, Design & UI/UX at Healthy Club introduce us to a very simple, professional meal & exercise planning platform for nutritionists, trainers, gymnasts, clinicians & research centers enabling them to look after their clients in a revolutionary new way and stay close to them at all times. The biggest asset of their platform is the meal planner, which exploits a preexisting database of foods and supplements, allowing clients to achieve easily better performance in their health goals. The project is unique in Greece, created from scratch with only 2 competitors internationally, as they say. Interviewed by Katerina Giosma for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Zetta Korda and Anaxagoras Fotopoulos, two members of the Ingredio team (Dr. Zoe Kournia, the founder and CEO was not available at the time of this interview) explain how their mobile app works: a simple scanning of the ingredient label, on a cosmetic product or food package, with a smartphone camera is all you need in order to check for the toxicity of ingredients correlated with official databases provided by the World Health Organization and the European Commission. This free app (or on a budget subscription for heavier use) presents the toxicity grade of each sole ingredient and overall for the product, helping users and customers make healthy informed decisions about the products they buy. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Katerina Exakoustidou Co-Founder of Vitabroad talks about their full-service facilitator for medical tourism in Greece, which creates personalised medical travel plans, including healthcare services, accommodation, travel tickets, wellness and tourism services for international patients seeking treatment. The quality of their services is ensured, as she points out, stemming from established partnerships with European & American board certified physicians, as well as national and international accredited Greek private, for the time being, hospitals and clinics. Interviewed by Katerina Giosma for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Vangelis(or Vangos) Pterneas, honoured by Microsoft with the title of Most Valuable Professional for his contributions to the technical community and CTO of Kinetisense, explains the impact their product has in motion analysis for patients and clinicians and how they use Microsoft Kinect to accomplish it. Kinetisense is a real-time motion analysis tool for practitioners, physiotherapists and personal trainers. It can analyse the range of motion for the patient’s shoulders, the back, the elbows and the knees allowing the practitioner to understand the improvement (or not) in motion. Kinetisense is useful to clinicians but also to athletes and even dentists, as Vangos explains, due to posture change after dental surgery. He goes on to talk about the rest of the team and the funding the Canadian company has received. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Nikos Naoum, Head of Product and Co-founder at Blueline talks about their mobile app, a real time on demand matchmaking-tool which connects patients and doctors. Although the app has competition they believe that following the ‘Uber’ model of allowing doctors to show real-time their availability, they will be able to serve patients within 2 hours but also motivate doctors to join since this will mean customers for them, exactly when they need them. The team is looking into collaborations with hotels and tourist offices in order to get access to tourists who usually have a hard time finding an available doctor in a foreign country. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Do we know how to use our health data and what are the best choices for us? Although we often hear about patient empowerment, are we literate enough to understand what our health data mean? Three health IT professionals have set out to open this conversation, and while during eHealth Week they presented their first panel discussion on the Digital Health Compass, as they have named their quest, we thought we’d ask in person what they aim to accomplish. Anne Moen - President at the European federation for Medical Informatics & Professor at the University of Oslo, Catherine Chronaki - Secretary General for the HL7 Foundation, and Ed Hammond - Director for the Duke Center for Health Informatics & Chai

Steve Lieber, President & CEO of HIMSS, talks about HIMSS, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting a better understanding of health care information and management systems. He explains who their audience is and what kind of services they provide their community. We ask him if they’re working on behavioural change for clinicians and how difficult it is to keep up with the constant changes in informatics and educating their audience. HIMSS started out in the US but during the last years it has been branching out into Europe and Asia. It’s interesting to hear about their approach to growth. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Henrique Martins, President of the SPMS board talks about the NHS implemented services they’re working on in Portugal. He discusses their choices and how these have changed the citizens perception about the NHS. He talks about paperless health; the Open Data portal and its APIs the death certificate connected with the system to avoid fraud; public access to data; their developer community and mobile apps, like the waiting time for a hospital appointment. Most importantly, he elaborates on how by exposing their data they have opened themselves to scrutiny but in the meantime also added significant pressure on providing quality of data and overall efficiency. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Tapani Piha, Head of eHealth Unit in the European Commission discusses eHealth and the European Commission, and how it facilitates member states to learn from each other in order to stimulate growth and development. Mr. Piha participated in the eHealth Network meeting during the eHealth Week, so we asked him how he sees member states performing when it comes to eHealth. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.