Caring innovation from 010!

Smart solutions by Rotterdam start-ups and scale-ups, each of which contributes something to healthcare in its own way.

Rotterdam is bursting with creative go-getters. People, organisations and companies that aren’t sitting idle but are doing their best to come up with smart solutions that will help us all. In our city, there are many entrepreneurs and young companies (start-ups and scale-ups) that are making progress locally, nationally and internationally with their innovative care solutions. Some of these are worth naming in this tough COVID19 time. They each add something unique and are of value to the care for us and our vulnerable fellow human beings.

How are your parents?

While the rules of the intelligent lockdown are now gradually easing, many of us are still dealing with loved ones we can’t visit. How are your (grand)parents living alone managing? What if something happens to them at home? Sensara developed an easy-to-install solution based on a set of sensors that recognise and report on activities and movements in the home. It enables you to keep an eye on your (grand)parents without physically being there.

Follow conversations without being able to hear

The deaf and hard of hearing have a lot of trouble conducting and following conversations in daily life. Especially for conversations like an important appointment with a doctor, which can add more pressure. SpeakSee is an advanced microphone and speech recognition system that very accurately converts speech into text, with a separate colour for each participating speaker. This happens in less than one second, on your smartphone, laptop or tablet. Very handy and nice, especially in these stressful times.

Photo: Speaksee

Smart analysis of medical scans

How can AI (‘Artificial Intelligence’) help to make the correct medical diagnoses and fight COVID19? That was the question Quantib focused on. They develop smart algorithms that help radiologists to analyse medical images such as CT scans even better so that they can diagnose diseases before symptoms occur. The faster and more accurate the diagnosis, the better the chance of preventing disease, and prevention is always better than cure.

Support for surviving relatives

It’s not only direct medical care for patients that is demanding a lot of attention at the moment. The relatives of deceased patients also have a lot to deal with. In ‘normal’ times, dealing with a death is already hard enough, but in these COVID19 times, it is extra stressful. Closure helps relatives with the red tape involved in terminating the subscriptions, contracts and accounts of deceased loved ones. They do this using a SaaS (‘Software as a Service’) solution, together with corporate partners and funeral directors.

These are difficult times in which much attention is rightly being paid to healthcare. Rotterdam has a very active care cluster in which there is a collaboration between entrepreneurs, companies, care institutions and researchers. This regularly creates innovations that arise locally and subsequently grow further nationally and internationally. The four we mention in this article are just a few examples. There are, of course, more. Take a look at the Dutch Tech Heroes Fighting COVID19 list (where you will, of course, not only encounter Rotterdam companies). You can also take a look at the Life Sciences & Health 010 website for more information about Rotterdam’s developments and achievements in the healthcare sector.