2020 showed us that speed is critical. We all witnessed how the coronavirus quickly spread across the globe, and officials faced the daunting task of tracing case contacts and containing the pathogen. With quarantines increasing throughout the world, healthcare providers and governments have been forced to implement solutions beyond their walls to monitor the coronavirus more than ever. Luckily, startups and researchers around the globe were fast to adapt to the new circumstances pivoting their technologies to help fight the spread of this deadly virus.

Innovation in the Time of a Global Pandemic

At Plug and Play Munich, we have been monitoring the European startup ecosystem and have pulled together some interesting startups from our current and previous Insurtech batches that have developed a COVID-19 solution. Interesting solutions that help tackle the COVID-19 crisis are not only developed by health tech startups, but also by startups beyond the healthcare space that aims to target other issues like knowledge mapping, tracing and ensuring safety with home-office set-ups.

In this article, we highlight some stellar solutions in diagnostics and monitoring that are being used as incredible tools to help fight the spread of the virus.

Clearbox AI

How Do They Help Fighting The Consequences Of COVID-19?

The COVID-19 emergency prompted Clearbox.ai to leverage their technology to deploy an AI-enabled Decision Support System (DSS) that can be used for COVID-19 diagnosis using chest X-ray images.

There is a lot of excitement about using Deep Learning-based technologies to diagnose COVID-19 using X-Ray images. However, there is a lack of transparency and interpretability. Clinicians and doctors don't trust in the model outcomes and the benefits of AI remain untapped.

For each X-ray image, Clearbox.ai’s system outputs a diagnostic score and highlights portions of the image used to make that prediction. Together with the prediction, the tool provides test accuracy scores for each diagnosis, possible anomalies in the output, and a robustness analysis that shows how the prediction changes when the input image is changed with controlled perturbations. In addition, users will be able to input other data describing the patient conditions, that combined with the X-ray image will give a more robust prediction.

Curiosity

Curiosity’s software helps companies access and use their unstructured knowledge, which is especially important as more people work remotely.

Curiosity enables companies to do that with their AI-powered tools. Search makes it easy to find documents and experts by linking them to a searchable knowledge graph. Topic mining helps to find, analyze and monitor clusters of documents. e.g. in customer feedback or quality reports. Finally, the AI framework makes it easy to build custom knowledge applications for special cases. All of the tools offer no-code AI with unmatched performance, easy setup, and enterprise-grade scale and security.

The tools are based on Curiosity’s custom AI software that integrates proprietary NLP and graph database capabilities with UIs and active machine learning. Each system is self-contained and can be hosted securely within customer environments.

How Do They Help Fighting The Consequences Of COVID-19?

To help medical researchers with COVID-19, Curiosity built a tool that links 45.000 papers into a searchable knowledge graph. This free to use platform utilizes Curiosity’s AI-enabled graph and search technology to enable users to easily explore the many articles, research papers, and datasets.

We connect the largest corporations in the health and insurance industries to the best startups in the world.Join our platform todayand gain access to a network of over 30,0000 future-thinking startups, like Clearbox or Curiosity.

DynaRisk

DynaRisk is a cybersecurity company focused on protecting both consumers and SMEs from a growing number of digital threats. DynaRisk’s platforms are designed to take the guesswork out of cybersecurity by actively helping users and businesses to minimize their cyberattack surface. They work with banks, insurers, and other large organizations to provide their risk management solutions to end clients. DynaRisk helps its partners to reduce fraud losses, improve loss ratios, differentiate from competitors, and improve customer retention.

How Do They Help Fighting The Consequences Of COVID-19?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, DynaRisk has seen a surge in cybercrime as more businesses have moved to remote working. With more employees working from home, corporate cyber defenses are weaker. Cybercriminals have actively taken advantage of the pandemic, targeting small businesses in a number of sectors.

DynaRisk has launched a brand-new platform for SMEs - DynaRisk Breach Defence - and is offering free beta access to new and existing clients. DynaRisk Breach Defence is an all-in-one cyber risk management platform that helps SMEs to reduce their attack surface by training staff, monitoring the dark web for data breaches, and alerting administrators when data records or assets are leaked online.

Etsimo

How Do They Help Fighting The Consequences Of COVID-19?

Etsimo’s CE-marked medical device is an AI-driven solution based on demographic information, symptoms, and risk factors and it helps to guide patients to the right care at the right time with the right information. Etsimo’s COVID-19 version is being built on the same technology and will be able to give probabilities on COVID-19 and other respiratory infections. This means that it is able to grade suspicions of the virus and also estimate other possible reasons, i.e. diseases for the symptoms. This provides peace of mind to the consumer while giving the opportunity to triage them to non-COVID-19 care and thus offloading coronavirus related services.

Etsimo’s triaging is personalized – consumers’ care needs are evaluated and triaged based on the current severity of their symptoms in combination with their personal risk factors. As a result, consumers can be segmented into different risk groups and given different care paths even if the symptoms and subsequent prediction probability for COVID-19 between two patients are the same. It can also be used to rank patients for molecular testing. Etsimo’s aim is to be the next best thing after a molecular test.

IDEE

IDEE transforms our digital interactions with trustworthy digital identities backed by truly password-less authentication and authorizations.

How Do They Help Fighting The Consequences Of COVID-19?

The use cases are endless. Given the COVID-19 crisis, IDEE developed an app to help health authorities fight the spread.

Individuals who have a reasonable suspicion that they are infected can use the app to pass on this information quickly and anonymously to their direct and extended contacts. This allows everyone in the chain to immediately follow the official course of action when symptoms appear. Test results where applicable, can be displayed or scanned to comply with third-party requirements e.g. building, venue, or stadium access.

FightTheSpread is destined to be chosen by regional and national health authorities who value privacy and data protection. Once endorsed, FightTheSpread can immediately include the contact tracing technology proposed by Apple and Google.

Together, this created an anonymous but actionable information network that can help prevent unnecessary quarantines and freedom limiting measures.

Innovation in insurance is happening.To stay up to date on the latest health and insurance technology startups, join the Plug and Play Platform. Our Insurtech program in Munich runs twice a year boosting our startups through corporate business development, networking and pitch events, world-class mentorship, and the potential for investment.