My next group of guests are all in the 2021 cohort of the ‘AI for Social Impact Programme’ – which is a partnership between Social Tech Trust, Microsoft and Microsoft for Startups. Social Tech Trust is a UK charity that supports purpose driven ventures using technology to make a positive impact on people’s lives – which is a great fit for The Impact Interview and why it’s awesome to have them in my corner helping to showcase some fantastic businesses.

First up is David Holmes, founder and CEO of FollowApp.Care, a business with the potential to really drive better health outcomes globally by bringing dentists and patients together through personalised digital care journeys.

Dental health is a hugely neglected part of our personal health. Most people view a trip to the dentist as a very occasional, necessary evil, and many will only bother going when they have a painful reason to do so. As a result, global state of oral health is pretty problematic , whether you’re in the UK or in a far less advantaged country. And oral health is largely ignored as a precursor or predictor of overall health and wellbeing.

FollowApp.care’s  smart technology products aim to increase engagement between patient and dentist by managing the entire patient journey outside of the medical practice.

David studied dentistry in his native Australia and then in the US before coming to the UK, where he still practises part-time in central London. He launched FollowApp.care in 2014

We’re back in Healthtech and Medtech this week with a really interesting and innovative business that has taken off in the last 12 months. The focus is breathing, that all-important facet of everyday health and wellbeing, but also a critical indicator of medical problems, not to mention a key factor in athletic performance.  Specifically, we are talking about the monitoring of your breathing in real-time and receiving actionable insights into your respiratory health. Using a smart mask and, of course, your smartphone.

My guest is George Winfield, CEO and Co-founder of SPYRAS a healthtech start up launched in 2018 to develop innovative respiratory technologies and analytics.  George studied Product design engineering at Loughborough University and went on to complete his Masters of Research in Medical Device Design and Entrepreneurship at Imperial College - incidentally alongside two Impact Entrepreneurs who I’ve recently interviewed on the podcast. So the program is clearly fulfilling its brief and helping to launch some exciting Impact businesses.

George and Spryras have also been supported by several leading accelerator programs, including being part of the first cohort of MedTech Superconnector.

Given the respiratory impact of Covid-19 and the sudden adoption of mask-wearing last year, the timing and demand for their smart technologies could not be better.

Taking a different tack this week, my guest business is founded on design innovation rather than new technology, and is destined to have a major social impact in terms of gender equality, as well as having clear benefits for health, safety and sustainability.

Peequal is a long-awaited and much needed design innovation in the femtech space that, simply put, gives women the freedom to pee. My guests Amber Probyn and her co-founder Hazel McShane have designed the UK’s first standalone women’s urinal.

The original motivation is to solve the issue of long queues for ladies toilets at festivals and other public events, but the potential goes far beyond that. Amber and Hazel are both recent graduates from Bristol University – completing Master’s degrees with Innovation in Anthropology and Physics respectively, and I discovered them via the Aspect Accelerator program.

As a startup entrepeneur living thousands of miles from home, Ben Lakey experienced first hand the lack of mental health support available to those in need in the UK. Long waiting lists to see a specialist, combined with a confusing array of digital apps with mixed clinical validity. So he joined Entrepreneur First, met his co-founder Jorge, and launched his second startup - Syndi Health - a digital mental health recommendation platform to support people on their mental health pathway.

Introduction

This week, I’m continuing my conversations with early stage startups that are coming through London’s healthtech accelerator ecosystem, which it turns out is pretty extensive. Most of my guests in this series have been part of the Aspect or Sim DH accelerator programs, respectively run by LSE and South Bank university.

My guest, Ben Lakey co-founder and CEO of Syndi Health, has recently been on the SimDH program, having met Jorge his co-founder at Entrepreneur First. Syndi is his second health-focused startup, having also launched a direct-to-consumer prosthetic limb business  - and I’m very grateful to him for his introductions to some great entrepreneurs in the medtech space who will hopefully appear on the podcast in the near future.

So we all know that digital health is a huge growth market at the moment, and the range of digital health solutions available through your smartphone is literally mind-boggling. In the mental health space alone, there are apparently about 20,000 apps available, and even those with proven clinical validity are too numerous to really comprehend. For the increasing numbers of people seeking mental health support, even with direction from a clinician, the chances of them finding the solution that best fits their particular needs, without a lengthy and stressful trial and error process, are pretty slim.

That is where Syndi Health and their digital health recommendation platform comes in.

Syndi has created the world’s most accessible and personalised digital mental health recommendation system to enable people to measure and self-manage their health - without asking for overwhelming amounts of information.

Ben graduated in mechanical engineering in Canada, and then came to London to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions. He completed a Masters of Research in Medical Device Design and Entrepreneurship at Imperial College in 2018, and has been awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering 1851 Enterprise Fellowship.

This week we’re in Medtech and, as with a lot of medical devices, there’s a major impact on Inclusion – allowing people with a disability to lead a more normal life. We’re talking about a technology that can transform the lives of people living with amputations of their lower limbs, which is a much larger number than you might think, and worryingly trending upwards.

My guest is Ugur Tanriverdi, co-founder and CEO of Unhindr, an adaptive robotics startup that is creating comfortable prosthetics that can be controlled and adapted with your mobile phone.

He and his team have designed a wearable robotic liner that uses Artificial Intelligence to learn your comfort settings and adapts to them automatically throughout the day.

Ugur is a Bioengineering Scientist, with a Masters in Research in Medical Device Design and Entrepreneurship from Imperial College London, following a Masters from Brunel and a first degree in Biomedical engineering from Ye-di-te-pay university in Istanbul. He also seems to be finding time to complete his phD at Imperial, and has been selected as the London Mayor’s entrepreneur for 2020 by Sadiq Khan.

Among many other awards, last year, Unhindr was named one of the 15 most innovative start-ups in Europe by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology in partnership with GE Healthcare, Cap Digital and Imperial College.

And they are continuing this great momentum in 2021, having just raised £half a million pounds in funding from Innovate UK.

2020 was the year of the nurse and the midwife, even before the pandemic. Their work is essential, but inefficiencies and understaffing stretch their capacity to the limit. Sam Mugisha, an engineer and social entrepreneur, saw the acute problem in Uganda and decided to design a digital solution. 

This episode is about the impact of digital health and entrepreneurship in resource-poor settings – in this case in  East Africa. It's inspiring to me to find out how big problems get solved in countries where financial support – for healthcare, for innovation and often for basic essentials is in really short supply.

My guest is multi-award winning social tech entrepreneur Samuel Mugisha of Uganda-based social enterprise Tatu Nurse.

Sam graduated from the University of Manchester in 2018 with a MSc. Advanced Computer Science. He also has an MBA, and 8 years’ experience building e-health applications for resource poor settings. He is cofounder at Stre@mline; an Electronic Medical Records platform, where he led product design, development and strategy. Over half a million Ugandans are now on the platform, which is used in 21 hospitals in rural Uganda.

Tatu nurse is a mobile phone application that enables nurses to work smarter by providing them with the right information at the right time, hence improving the efficiency of bed side monitoring.

Tatu is a Swahili word that means three. Their mission is to boost the performance and efficiency of nurses by at least 3 times. They recognise the heroic role played by nurses and that they need better support to do their work better.

Tatu nurse fits in the daily routine of nurses enabling them to manage the many patients under their care efficiently. Tatu nurse is tailored to the specific context and needs of low-resource hospitals, has local technical support available and is economically sustainable. They have a patient-centered, practical and integrated approach focused on improving the quality of nursing care.

So I started the series with two episodes focused on digital therapeutics, and the use of technology in enhancing cognitive function. The next two episodes take one step back from the patient and the treatment, and look at ways that technology can support medical professionals to perform their jobs more effectively, so that they can help more people and inevitably save more lives. Next week’s episode is about helping nurses – to be more efficient, more effective and ultimately happier and more fulfilled in their work.

This week’s episode is about dramatically improving the work load of doctors – and other clinical professionals -, reducing their stress levels and clearing the way to a much better doctor/ patient relationship.

My guest is Mohamed Alibashe, CEO and co-founder of HealthMe.

Mohamed is a medical doctor with extensive clinical research and managerial experience. He is also a phD and studied for his MBA at Imperial College London, where he met his co-founders and launched the business in 2019

Imagine if you could have a consultation with your doctor and not only did he or she have all of your records at their fingertips, but they could spend the time during the appointment actually focusing on you and your medical condition, without the constant need to type up notes and update your records. At the end of your consultation, the report is automatically generated and can be shared with you and anyone else you want to share it with.

As a doctor, you have a much higher quality patient interaction, and don’t waste vast amounts of time on patient admin.

That is the purpose of HealthMe, a healthtech start up that is developing an AI-powered platform that automatically generates medical reports.

I found the business through the Simulation for Digital Health accelerator at London’s South Bank University and it’s also supported by several other accelerators including Imperial College, Panaceas Stars and P4 Precision Medicine.

Knowledge is power - especially when it comes to understanding your own medical future.

My guest is Sylvain Piquet, COO of Sharp Therapeutics – aka SharpTx - a digital therapeutics business that he co-founded in 2019 with CEO Xavier Louis. The team at Sharptx is building engaging and accessible digital tools for the tracking and improvement of cognitive health. They want to help prevent and detect dementia years earlier and at a fraction of the cost of current methods, extending quality of life for millions of people through personalised lifestyle improvements.

Dementia is a condition that is massively on the rise - particularly in lower and middle income countries – and the World Health Organisation has recognised it as a public health priority. It is one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people worldwide. It has a physical, psychological, social, and economic impact, not only on people with dementia, but also everyone close to them and society at large.

It’s still relatively little understood condition and there’s no cure available or even a treatment that can alter its progressive course, although plenty of new treatments are being investigated in clinical trials. But it’s not an inevitable consequence of ageing and we do now know that people can do a lot themselves to reduce the risk of developing it in later life. That is where SharpTx comes in - listen in to find out more!

For more inforamtion, you can visit www.sharptx.life and connect with Sylvain on Linkedin.

This episode is about the economics of Impact – and how measuring Impact can enable the best use of capital and so accelerate positive change globally. As you'd expect, technology has a huge role to play, and my guest is the epitome of an impact tech entrepreneur.

I start with a quote for Sir Ronald Cohen's book "Impact":

“Impact, he says, needs to be brought to the heart of our society and take its place at the centre of our economic system. …We need to shift to a system that encourages making as much money as possible but in a way that is consistent with achieving the highest impact and with the lowest level of risk. Impact must become ingrained in our society’s DNA, part of a triple helix of risk-return-impact that influences every decision we make regarding consumption, employment, business and investment. It needs to become a driving force of our economy.

He goes on to say that: if we regard impact investing as our rocket ship to social change, impact measurement is our navigation system. It will lead to change and the establishment of new norms.”

Darshita Gillies, founder and CEO of MAANCH, is building that navigation system.

Maanch is a multi-award winning global impact platform - it unifies the impact of institutional funders, companies, investors and social enterprises. They inspire and enable participants of the impact ecosystem to re-allocate capital and resources towards achieving the UN SDGs - through data, intelligence, dashboards and networks.

My first guest of Series 2 is a great example of a mission-driven Impact Entrepreneur. Ellis Parry is co-founder and CEO of an exciting healthtech startup that he was driven to build as a result of a personal tragedy back in 2012. He managed to complete his engineering degree and phd at Oxford before the business could properly launch in 2019, but he and his team have achieved an enormous amount since then.

Neumind is a digital therapeutic that is focused on the alarmingly-high number of people who suffer cognitive impairment due to brain injuries that are caused by trauma or result from a stroke. Ellis and his team have developed an app called Alfred that has been shown to dramatically improve the quality of life and independence of users as they go through long term neurorehabilitation.

He talks about the whole journey, from the traumatic, life-changing event that gave rise to the idea, how winning a university competition was a defining moment, how he bonded with his brand new co-founder on an accelerator program in the Baltic Sea, and the importance of grant funding for impact-driven start-ups, particularly in healthcare.

Some of the statistics he mentions are disturbing: both the numbers of people affected and the small proportion who receive any formal clinical neurorehabilitation. Neumind’s solution goes well-beyond the limitations of brain training apps, and involves taking the idea of cognitive training and puts it into the context of a person’s everyday life.

Thanks to the Aspect Student Accelerator Programme (hosed by LSE) for bringing Ellis and Neumind to my attention. If you’d like to find out more and follow their progress, you can sign up on www.neumind.co.uk