Ray Dogum, Pierre-Alexandre Fournier, and Jin Wei Kocsis at Converge2Xcelerate Conference (Boston, MA)
HIGHLIGHTS
- In 2013, Hexoskin introduced the first washable ‘smart shirt’ to capture cardiac and respiratory metrics
- Hexoskin developed ‘Astroskin’ which is used on International Space Station to monitor Astronauts health
- AI market expected to grow to $190 billion by 2025
FULL COVERAGE
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS: Ray Dogum, Founder of Health Unchained, Pierre-Alexandre Fournier, Founder/CEO of Hexoskin, and Jin Wei Kocsis, Assistant Professor at Purdue University
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 00:00
My name is Ray Dogum and I am the founder of Health Unchained. Health Unchained is a podcast where I actually interview entrepreneurs, executives who are using blockchain technology in the healthcare space. So the podcast is available on all podcasting platforms and today our conversation will be about is titled medical moonshots in space the final frontier, and my honor honorary guests here our panelist today is Pierre-Alexandre Fournier and Jin Wei-Kocsis and I let them introduce themselves. Whenever they are ready and whenever the mikes are also on,
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 00:54
Well, thank you for the introduction. So I’m going to present a few slides to explain what we do with Hexoskin. So I’m co-founder and CEO takes Hexoskin. I still think about my co-founding role, but it’s been more than 10 years now. So we’ve been around for awhile. So we started the company Hexoskin, a skin as a machine, learning for healthcare startup tackling the problems of how do you a chronic disease management, chronic care and aging in place for people with chronic cardiac disease and pulmonary disease. And, and we were working on machine learning models, studying the literature and all that. And then we realized that there was a problem with data collection and what you see on the screen right now, it’s, it’s what is used today to collect ECG data from patients at home.
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 01:47
So this is a set up, you see all the tape that’s for holding the cables so they don’t pull on the electrodes. And that’s for 24 hour tests. When we talk about chronic Medicare, chronic disease management, it’s all year long and we’re asking patients to wear that for a few weeks, for a few months. They quit. It’s not acceptable for them and they’d rather not be monitored. So, and there’s a good reason for that is because these devices were not designed for long-term monitoring. So what we’ve done, if we go to the next slide, if you have a clicker or that’s actually work. So what we’ve done is we replaced the Holter ECG with smart shirt with a textile based sensors in them. And we’ve added also respiratory sensors and activity sensors so that you can replace what you see on the left by the smart shirt.
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 02:46
Like the one I’m wearing right now on the right shirt. And my shirt right now talks with my phone. So I can see my vital signs on my phone and my phone can send to our servers for analysis. And then the results, the summary can be put in my electronic health record for my medical team to consult. And this is happening while I’m on stage right now and it’s happening wherever in the world where I have an internet connection. So if we go to the next slide. So there’s many use cases for that. There’s, you know, chronic care management and post-acute care, clinical trials, clinical research. So we’re involved in a bunch of these things. One of these use case is monitoring astronauts in space. So the astronauts time is very precious in space and there’s very few astronauts that we send into space every year there. There’ll be just a dozen this year. So there’s very few opportunity to gather physiological that are in microgravity and we need to collect this kind of data to prepare for long-term space missions when we’re going to go back to the moon, when we are going to plan a mission to Mars because there’s a lot of things that we don’t know about physiology in microgravity now.
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 04:15
And there’s very few that are points we can connect. So what we’ve done last winter actually, so we’ve installed the system in the international space station for astronauts vital signs monitoring. So the system that you see on screen was installed by David Van Jaques in January. It monitors not only the EKG and breathing and movement like my ex is concerned, but he’s also attracts a PPG SPU to skin temperature and systolic blood pressure continuously. So you have continuous blood pressure measurement and PPG measurement ECG and all that coming from a system that’s done intrusive. So astronauts can still run their experiments. They have their hands free, they don’t have cables in the way of anything, so they can keep doing what they’re doing in the space station, but they’re recording pressures medical grade data in the space station.
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 05:09
And so if we go to the next slide, so we’re doing a bunch of research projects with these shirts. So we’re going into virtual clinical trials, decentralized clinical trials. This is one that this is one project that I really liked that is run by Boston children’s hospital its with patients with Rett syndrome, which is a very rare genetic disease that affects about 2,000 people in the US so to recruit patients, you automatically have to go multi-site. And in the first cohort, they recruited 20 patients in six different cities and they’ve built the largest physiological database for this disease in the world cause they’ve recorded these patients for many months, 24/7. So, so we hope that this kind of project would help develop new cures, new treatments, and better understand these diseases so we can help these people. So to go back here, so, my last slide.
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 06:34
So, the end game with all that is that if we want to build AI models for medicine, we need to somehow lower the cost of data and to be able to have enough data and do that fusions to build autonomous medical systems. This is not going to happen this year or next year, but this is something that we need on one side for space exploration and on the other side to take care of our aging population to automate as much as possible cognitive tasks that we’re doing on patients. Because right now the costs are mostly labor costs. So we want to automate cognitive tasks, we need to digitize the patient and we need to lower the cost of that. And this is what we’re doing at Hexoskin.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 07:25
Thank you Pierre. So now we can go to the slideshow. And you know, it’s really interesting, Pierre, because what you’re building is something right now for kind of astronauts, but also there’s so much applicability for humans here on earth for this type of tool. We’ll get to some questions.
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 07:52
My market is a very niche market. There’s only a few a year. So, we have thousands and thousands of users who wear these shirts, collect data either for personal reasons or because they participate in a research project. And the next year we’re going to have a FDA clearance on our next generation of smart shirts. So doctors will be able to prescribe these shirts for home monitoring post-acute care.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 08:23
Sure. Hello everyone. I hope you enjoy your time here. And I’m Jin Wei Kocsis, I’m assistant professor from Purdue University and I work in the department computer and information technology and that’s a day I would like to share some of our research results for the project of the blockchain enabled artificial intelligence and computing paradigm and allow this project is supported by the NASA or their career award. So this is kind of an outline of my talk. First I provide some motivation vibe around to do this work. And the second is a proposed hour. You, I loved computing paradigm and then the potential applications and the final remarks. Yeah, the first time occupation and the overall is because the wrong say self computing sensing and the networking, the data driven solution already become a very promising solution for different application views such as the smart and under system record infrastructures and the intelligent transportations and healthcare and the so on.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 09:43
However, because the computing devices were resources owned by the individuals in public nowadays still has a very limited computing intelligence and computing power. Therefore most of them still rely on the centralized cloud. The vendor, you know, out there to maintain their, they talk to a processing of their data. So it is okay for, you know, ours is fine, but that’s what a big challenge if we think about in deep space, in the deep space, all the spacecraft or satellite has a really limited computing power memory and the computing at colleges, for example, for the NASA, they do some small body studies, they can gather tons of data and deep space, but they basically just abandoned them in deep space. The reason is they don’t have enough power to process that. And this very costly. If they want to send that to the base station on ours and then to send back the decision.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 10:42
The reason is, for example, the sand from Mars to ours. They need a quantum midnight, just one day and then you have to feel is lucky enough. You know when your son exactly received that you under assign the window because you view, you miss that window. Basically your data stand for nothing. So therefore basically is a cost of you stand and then the other word to say that is if you have some emergency happened in the deep space, you don’t have enough time to address as issues in real crime potentially comes because of our critical situations. So because of that I think why didn’t the way try to a steal the backslides yet. So how about the way they tried to sink some way just a, you’ll see on the NASA this space, this after you go sample.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 11:32
How bout the way? Find some way come precise. Those States that you real calm you in deep space by leveraging all the potential spacecraft or satellites, which has a certain ability to assess and data. Although those capabilities were limited, but now they will come. And now the issue of security, because you cannot guarantee grantee out space carved all the site alive. You can see nearby it’s owned by NASA and the potential they had owned by the other countries such as the Russia. So that tries to tie in. That doesn’t mean that they are malicious, just the means they’ll trust the worse than this. It’s kind of low. So the overall, the central idea of this project is how about the way leveraging, the blockchain technology smarter. And again you can turn internet of things and the also the software defined network and emotion learning to develop a decentralized and with you become computing and system, very able to enable, a very effective collaboration amongst the computer nodes, which potentially it has a limited computing power.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 12:35
They may to the computing and highly urgent even though they can potential the AmTrust sports news to each other. So that is the general idea all the way down to do so. Next slide. So next I began to talk about our work next. Yeah, so this kind of gives you a big future. I know it’s a very difficult to Conrad, the small letters in the the prowess, but in general the idea here is they tried to acquit in fact you call it formation or cognitive computing power that enabled a Scotter to compete with your nose, can collaborate with each other even though they now trust each other and those compete with your notes can play as well as the story rows potentially. They can be application in nearshore, HR can be the computing contributors. They also can be the verification contributors that I vacation.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 13:27
You need to aid her. Basically they can broadcast their task basically to ask her for help through this kindof decentralized computing platform out there to broadcast as if they see the need to characterize the other car. How they categorize the objectives and the constraints of the data driven task by characterizing information. You had told us smart contract and blockchain. By doing so Nova and potentially communist people later the task, you know based on the awareness and then they will push some data. The saying that the other collaborators am my the need of those kinds of data. You went to the UN. I’ve chain decentralized the replies for example IPFS because that is supported by blockchain. You knew the ability, you know other wards the integrity, the security, also teat and then after the broadcast you ended up blockchain that our computing country built our space.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 14:28
If they are valuable participant in this task, we’ll draw in that and then began their local training that you will see with our private data what they, the data sharing the by the addiction you show a thorough coding tool. The constraints and objectives already categorize you in the smart contract and after the train the fuel is good enough. They will claim you end up blockchain at that time and not archive of a player which the verification you show later they’ll kick in and then to lie, verify the value off those climbed the model. You have the verification is a positive. They will young farmed at diction each Reuter who will fuels all of those local learn you model, which has a good value and know cheap the model. The mental model basically is a much more of the wrongs that compute your model to address their problem, you know, matter of fact way rather than rely on the central cloud vendor and so on.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 15:22
So that is the general idea of this one. So next please. So here is our, did you buy a lot of the Poteau type the hot bar in the lower part of type two and realize this the all the prototype show, the pink chart down, it’s a much larger scale. We just categorized here is the part of them. So basically that has a computing on the Osama is just a raspberry PI. We know that has a very limited computing power. Some is the Navidea. If you invented the GPU and there’s all sides represent the computing nodes and then they basically, that is the first layer that you send to our computing layer. And in the middle there is a blockchain to ground heat and the privacy and the blockchain to guarantee the privacy and the security. And the last layer is the software defined and I work you’re peer to peer networking.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 16:17
So unite both resilient the communication systems and then they already work is NASA land center or they for two years and the way I have testing our system, our prototype by using the data provided by the plan center and this year at the beginning of this year with walking with them to see how we can integrate our thing. Their testing system Chiron’s there has a testing system cause the three cool satellites and debate looking into how we can integrate that into the system out there to verify the performance or more practically. So the next slide please. So next I talk about the potential. I be occasional again, I believe the future of the computing. Okay. It’s only my opinion. It is cooperative computing because I believe what people need a claim, the ownership of their data. I’ll try to make the value of their data.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 17:08
And make the value of their computing colleges rather than Oh, trust contribute, die for nothing to the cloud vendors. Therefore I sing the computing is the future of the computing, which is now the only apply to the NASA deep space can using all kinds of application. For example, the connected house care because we have so many photo genius devices for the house care and the CLI got hydro genius data we can use, we can library those States that potentially is high severity sensitive, need that privacy, preservation, you know, other tools still want to make a device. And the another one is the smart, the manufacturer because there’s all kinds of money factoring nowadays. Nieto collaborative. Out there to make the big value and then the smart city. So next please. So at last the remark, so again, I view my work like a tree because the top of the tree, basically this leaves is the conference room of these centralized, the deep learning.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 18:10
Computing knows laws it’s fine. But if you want to keep the house of the tree, you cannot really move like a removal or loss of the leaves. Therefore you have to have more than enough for leaves the unable to make the survive of this tree. So, and then I think the middle part is stop blockchain because the branch, because of that branch is kind of connected between the physical world. And then that data you will have to make sure that branch is trust. The words, say your NAF is a housing and now to make all the information transferred in a high trustworthy at the last of it have to make sure the physical support is good enough. It’s a reliable, robustly enough. There are for our power. That is the deep, I love this kind of software defined network based up here to appear resilient networking. That’s it. Thank you.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 19:05
Perfect. Thank you both so much for presenting that work that you’ve been doing. Obviously a lot of real world applications that are going on here with, with blockchain and with telehealth, with the Hexoskin suit. I have many questions for both of you. I kind of wanted to quickly start with Jin cause it’s fresh on our mind. The first question that comes to mind is when you think of blockchain, a lot of people think of a lot of computing power. You need a lot of space, you know, if you’re going to say that satellites are getting smaller and smaller, is it sustainable to put the blockchain and satellites in space?
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 19:37
Yeah, I think so. So I think though, let me talk about blockchain. A lot of people think about Bitcoin, which is a really, the first, the good successful example of blockchain. But here when I talk about blockchain, it’s more by clog about the backbone of the technology rather than the application there. Therefore, it’s really depends on what kind of a consensus a part of the goal we talk about whether we need to make sure our computing’s or it’s necessary to make all the computing is high change rather than often. All those questions I used to enable to address a properly based on the application before
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 20:15
A quick follow-up, which protocols are you currently utilizing?
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 20:19
Currently? The way you will see in the proof of work that is a, for the testing by the way, kind of was switch to the proof of a sorority. I was, Oh, I know, perhaps sovereignty is a problem. NIDA is a permission blockchain, but because currently we’re caulking about in the deep space, so that is the appropriate that justified the study, but that isn’t really, is the task driven or application driven.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 20:44
Interesting. Yeah. Thank you. Pierre I have a question for you regarding the Hexo share it because I’m actually curious about getting one myself. How many times can you wash it?
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 20:55
So, we test them too so that it works properly and it works as new. Even if there are 50 washes, which is way more than you would wash any piece of tones that you have in your wardrobe.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 21:07
And would you have to charge it? How long does a battery last?
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 21:09
Yeah. So there’s a, there’s a small device that connects on the side and, and the battery lasts up to 48 hours.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 21:16
Interesting. So you know, there’s this mission to the moon in 2024 and you’re probably both working on it at some level of degree. How involved are you with that mission right now? Are you trying to get more involved?
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 21:30
Well, yes. So, I cannot disclose everything, but right now we have this monitoring system in the space station that is the monitoring system that NASA and other spaces agencies use the Canadian space agency, the European, the Japanese would use it as well. And we’ve invested, well the space agencies invested millions of dollars and years and making it space grade so that it could fly. So we hope they reuse the same system to go to the moon with the Artemis missions in 2024.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 22:06
Are you also involved with that mission?
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 22:09
Currently we’re talking with the NASA Glenn center and other NASA research center to look into what kind of role we can play for this big task.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 22:19
Interesting. Question for you, Pierre. What kind of issues can a human get when they’re in space? Because you know, you’re like, we like to think of astronauts as superhuman. There’ll be fine, but they’re being exposed to a lot of radiation. They’re alone in a certain space with the same people. So there’s also a lot of mental health issues they might be experiencing. So what kind of, you know, conditions could ask him about his face?
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 22:45
Yeah, so there’s many things. There’s radiation on one side that has effects that we know about. There’s micro gravity micro gravity changes the fluidic of everything in your body and your buddy was not, didn’t evolve for that. And that cause problems similar to aging in astronauts, meaning the develop boneless muscle. Us astronauts typically train over two hours a day just to try to keep their muscle mass, but that, that’s not even enough there. They’re still losing weight. All the fluids move in the upper body. They have intracranial pressure problems visual problems. And then you have the problems of sleep in the space station. Sure. Because there was no real day and night when you’re up there, you’re going around the planet 16 times a day. So you have 16 sunsets every day. You don’t know when you should be sleeping or not. So they have of problems with that. Using sleeping pills is common in this space station. So, and this is another thing that we’d like to study in space. So how did you sleep in microgravity?
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 23:58
So there’s a lot of talk about AI during this conference and just in general in the industry, why can’t we put some sort of autonomous AI medical doctor on these spaceships?
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 24:09
Well, I think the main reason is we don’t have enough data points still to automate most of what we want to automate with an AI. Especially when we talk about physiological data points in space, we only have, we’ve sent a little bit more than 50 people in space over the past 60 years. And that’s it. That’s a very small population. And we don’t know much about long duration space flight, but even on earth when we talk about completely automated medical system or a medic an AI doctor we barely started digitizing patients. We just started with EHR. And EHR is don’t have enough information to play the role doctors play in our lives. So we probably need to record a lot of data over a lot of time before we can have an AI doctor that can do even basic tasks correctly at the level a doctor does. And I’m not talking about specific application in radiology for example, I’m talking about like an assistant, like a primary care physician.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 25:27
So, I’m sure it’s quite difficult for you to choose which markets you want to get into. The suit seems very, or the shirts seems very applicable to many different types of people. How do you as a company select which markets you want to enter?
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 25:40
Well, we do like doctors do. I mean we, we serve the markets where there’s demand and where’s there, there’s payment and funding and all that. And right now we’d like to do more prevention. Right now well most of the money traditionally goes to acute care to hospitals. Right now there’s some money going to chronic care management to post-acute care and rehabilitation thing. These are very interesting space. There’s a lot of gains to be obtain implementing correct programs for rehabilitation and chronic care management. I think the US can save hundreds of billions dollars, maybe not saved, but at least reallocate these resources to two other important problems. So that’s where we’re going right now. So the, the post-acute space rehabilitation and chronic care management.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 26:34
I don’t know if Jin had anything to add to that question. And just in general, how AI can be included in space travel and just in general AI is evolving or how it is evolving in the industry.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 26:46
Yeah, I think the ad definitely is a very attractive point, but we need to make sure when people are in deep space reliability, safety is first a priority rather than how fancy the AI can, the autonomy can achieve. Another thing is a vendor AI protect really precise the data locally. That’s fine. But if we potentially need a different AI to basically need to communicate with each other, I mean we’re careful about the communication inference and so on. That is kind of different story but that is kind of our potential and communication call, communication, friends, those things we need to sing.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 27:21
Interesting. And as I understand that sometimes there could be a delay with the transmission. When you’re in space, when you want to speak to someone on earth, obviously it could take 20 minutes or depending on how far you are. And you know, we get angry when someone’s not able to hear us immediately. So I’m thinking, you know, how are you working on helping the industry with that obstacle?
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 27:46
Oh, that’s an interesting question. And that’s one of the reason why we’re working on the architecture of a an autonomous medical system or an AI for space is that with the international space station, astronauts do today half of the time the test for note as doesn’t assign a flight surgeon on the ground that they consult on a regular basis and they have other specialists that consult the consult with because the delay is manageable. But if you go to Mars and even on the moon you know, the back and forth is many seconds. It makes it harder to sustain a conversation. And then on Mars it can be up to 20 minutes. So you cannot have a conversation if there’s a 20 minutes delay on each side. So you have to. build a system that can support the crew members during these flights, especially since right now in lower bid you can ship back an astronaut on earth and get them to an operating room in about six hours. There’s a protocol for that. But if they’re on the moon it takes days to have someone come back. And so we absolutely want to prevent any acute situation where we would have to abort a machine or Sentinel send an astronaut back to earth.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 29:06
Jean, this question is more targeted for you. I was doing some research on this industry and the satellite industry and it looks like many of them are refusing to use cloud based services for data management. So that’s just cloud, that’s like pre blockchain kind of stuff. Technology. so do you feel like it’s going to be a struggle to have the industry adopting blockchain because they’re still working through the cloud-based adoption?
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 29:31
I think of blockchain I view that as a next generation of the computing because I think it’s a little bit different from the cloud based. We cloud based is a more like a centralized, basically the cloud vendor who support that cloud infrastructure has all the basically rise on the data and on the processing. But the blockchain basically gave people their ownership of the data, the privacy of their data, and then they are able to make a buy the off that I think people kind of refuse to use that is because the trust, the worseness and also the also the privacy. So I think this blockchains can help to, to address that issue.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 30:19
Interesting. I want to make sure we have enough time for questions from the audience. So does anyone have any questions at this moment before I kind of jumped? Awesome. I can hand over this mic to you, I guess.
Speaker 1: 30:30
Thank you guys. Fascinating stuff. I’m with Athena health. I had a quick question for both, both of you kind of on each one of your topics. When we’re talking about the satellites, right? What is the, I’m just imagining the scenario, right? You’re in deep space and we’re using these satellites, to do processing, right. The distance that you would save would be the distance from the satellite. So instead of sending the signal from the space station to earth, that time that would typically take today, right. Here’s the hang do that to the satellites that are in orbit. Right. What’s the just general ballpark efficiency increase in that reduction in distance? Cause I’m trying to understand the benefit to doing it there instead of the cost is any completely all the way to earth.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 31:26
So I think it’s a really, we need to look at that in different pieces. The first, if they, let’s say if I want to send samples all the information from satellite to the, to the on the earth. Okay. So if a sand, for example, from the, from Mars, so around the Mars, so that the way basically is take upon him minutes one day and 14 minutes, two way. And also basically in the base station, it’s not a like a you receive any time I can process. They basically assign the different processing window, a social eighties with a different spacecraft or satellite. So basically when you stand you miss that window. So basically you cannot even receive that data or even receive your what? Nobody will process because nowadays the control center is now the autonomist now that said it’s a seal based on human, so basically humans, there are operators assigned the windows, so that is a thing from this tool piece.
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 32:22
Definitely if you are able to precisely the data in just the in the deep space rather than send the back is a bigger benefit. Another thing is actually another is the payload, but I save you the data. We can. especially I attended panel for the small body study, they can really achieve more than they can measure how much data they can clap and give deeper space of the available for the certain studies. But those data is the impossible. Even send the bag, let’s forget about all the delay it’s just the amount. This is the, we call the sandbag.
Speaker 1: 32:59
The other side question to that is how would the economics, have you thought about how the economics would work? So say you have a Russian satellite doing processing of American’s base station data they’re not going to do that for free. How does that take resources on their side? Has there been any thought to how the economic model might work for that?
Jin Wei Kocsis – Assistant Professor, Purdue University: 33:18
The goal, the point that you’re actually, this is I’m saying we’re looking into how they can get a good incentive. So, basically kinda incentivate the people with the participants is kind of cooperative computing. So that is kind of a little bit different story. So here is kind of more from the computing perspective. That is how you design the smart contract. So make, because smart contracts kind w and falls the policy. So how designed smart contract in order to realize a certain policy that people are willing to, to draw and participant. So we’re kind of looping into the games theory, the contracts theory, to design those systems out there to make sure they kind of achieve a goal that you clearly burn for the overall collaboration.
Speaker 1: 34:01
Awesome. Thank you. And for the, the wearables I see tons of application for, you know cost savings to be created. And when you think about, you know, prevention, right, especially with a lot of quality contracts out there now becoming more away from fee per service. So when you’re looking at kind of the larger market you know, what are the big competitors that you’re going to be facing? Cause I’m just thinking, I’m talking to my head is the, you know, no, the eye kit, they have created a lot of devices that are integrated into their eye kit and they create a kind of a centralized repository for this, what are your thoughts on competitors into that market? And then the second part to that is, you know, what is the connection strategy when it comes to, you know, you have to take the data and it has to be presented to a physician in a usable setting, right? There’s a million different systems out there and the barrier to actualize that data from the device into the usable care setting it’s going to vary of complexity. Right. What are thoughts on that as well?
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 35:09
Well, I think the key is workflow integration. If you provide a solution for chronic care management or for post-acute care, it needs to be integrated or in the workflow that that physicians and nurses and the care teams work within, or at least you need to manage change in a way that it doesn’t require too much training and forth to adopt the new workflow. And on the integration side, I think the integration within EHR is key because you want that, that’s where everybody shares the information today. And what we hear from physicians and their team is they don’t want to login into the 17 different systems to take care of their patients. They want everything at the same place. It makes it a lot of sense. And we integrate with the HER’s. And, and that’s how we go to support that.
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier – Founder/CEO, HexoSkin: 36:04
We don’t want to replace people. We don’t want to replace the EHR. We want to provide a supporting technology so that they can deliver the care at home and keep patients at home. So in regarding competitions there’s a few player right now I don’t think Apple is a player in the space because they have not done anything for workflow integration specifically right now. But it might change in the future. We’ll see. I think what we do is pretty unique though. We do things that you cannot do on the wrist. So long-term EKG, you cannot do that on the wrist. Breathing pattern monitoring. You cannot do that on the wrist. And we have very good literature now showing how good the patient adoption is with the smart shirts compared to other technologies and how precise the measurements are for ECG and also for the various lung disease like COPD.
Ray Dogum – Founder, Health Unchained: 37:10
Very good. Do we have time for more questions? Maybe afterward. Okay. Well let’s give a round of applause to our panelists. Thank you very much everybody. Thanks.