New Startup "ki elements" Spun off From EIT Digital Innovation Activity

BRUSSELS, June 27, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

At the beginning of 2017, EIT Digital launched ELEMENT, a new Innovation Activity to facilitate faster, earlier diagnosis and intervention for cognitive decline, which affects nearly 44 million people worldwide. The innovation activity ELEMENT has now reached a key milestone with the official launch of its start-up: ki elements UG.

     (Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/483248/eit_Digital_Logo.jpg )

The mission of ki elements is to provide health professionals with AI-empowered tools as key elements to excel in their profession. ELEMENT has implemented a first alpha version of the product targeting dementia diagnosis support for clinicians based on speech analysis.

Jan Alexandersson, CEO of the new start up and also Activity Lead of ELEMENT explains: "We collaborate closely with Association Innovation Alzheimer and the team around Pr. Philippe Robert, as the clinical development partner to test and co-develop our product. At ki elements, we believe that today's advances in computational linguistics give us the opportunity to render the full complexity of neurodegenerative diseases with respect to a unique human ability: natural language."

Jan Alexandersson continues: "The company is set up and fully operational. The next steps for us is that we are now working on a fully functional prototype so we can start engaging with our first customers by end of 2017/beginning of 2018. We are also working on CE certification of our product and looking to extending our portfolio towards the German market by the end of 2018. For 2017, our focus is on the French market".

Partners involved in the innovation activity are:

DFKI GmbH: Activity lead, coordination, mobile and app integration

ki elements UG (Hauftungsbeschränkt) (sub grantee of DFKI GmbH): commercialisation of project results

INRIA: Corpus collection, video analysis and clinical trials

University of Edinburgh: Trials and validation of current system for British English

Innovation Alzheimer (sub grantee of INRIA): Clinical partner providing access to dementia patients for French corpus collection and tests. Clinical personnel will be involved.

The Digital Wellbeing Action Line leverages digital technologies to stay healthy (prevention and early detection) or cope with an existing chronic condition. Both physical and mental wellbeing are considered. The solutions generally rely on enabling consumers to be well-informed about their wellbeing and to be able to use digital instrumentation to monitor and improve their quality of life, according to the motto "an ounce of prevention is worth at least a pound of cure."

EIT Digital seeks to generate significant innovations from top European research. As such, we focus our investments on a limited number of innovation areas known as Innovation Action Lines, that we have selected with respect to their European relevance and leadership potential. Each Innovation Action Line comprises a portfolio of activities including:

• open Innovation Activities carried out by the EIT Digital Partners, and
• fast-growing technology start-ups that are ready to scale commercially.

Our Innovation Activities deliver new products or services, create start-ups and spinoffs to commercialise outputs from projects, and encourage the transfer of technologies for market entry.

NB: logo and pictures on demand

About EIT Digital

EIT Digital is a leading European open innovation organisation that brings together a partnership of over 130 top European corporations, SMEs, start-ups, universities and research institutes. EIT Digital invests in strategic areas to accelerate market uptake of research-based digital technologies and to bring entrepreneurial talent and leadership to Europe.

EIT Digital is a Knowledge and Innovation Community of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). EIT Digital headquarters are in Brussels with co-location centres in Berlin, Budapest, Eindhoven, Helsinki, London, Madrid, Paris, Stockholm, Trento and a hub in Silicon Valley.

Media Contact:
Dr Edna Ayme-Yahil
Head of Communications
+33-6-44-09-19-28
edna.ayme@eitdigital.eu