USI students launch an innovative system for Remote Patient Monitoring

Attending events for startuppers can be interesting for young entrepreneurs to learn about current and future market trends, but also to draw the attention of potential investors. The latter is the case of Jacopo Pelanda Mazza, a graduate student at the USI Master in Management and Informatics, who at this year’s edition of the Start Summit in St. Gallen managed to arise the interest of leading Swiss telecommunications provider Swisscom, with his innovative business idea, originally devised during a course he took at USI.

Jacopo, who in spring was at the University of St. Gallen for his exchange semester, accepted the challenge launched by the “Pirate Hub” initiative, at the Swisscom booth installed at the Start Summit, which consisted in the video recording of a one-minute business pitch. Jacopo’s ‘performance’ convinced the organisers, who rewarded him with an admission to the Red Kickbox programe, a three-stage startup accelerator program supported by Swisscom, which (from the second stage) offers an initial round of funding going up to 50.000 Swiss francs. Swisscom is interested in all solutions and applications that exploit the new 5G network, which is also a key element in the realm of the Internet of Things, and especially in the area of Remote Patient Monitoring.

In the wake of this first encouraging impulse, Jacopo decided to create his own startup, UbiHealth, gathering a team of four other students, all enrolled in master programs at USI: Paolo Occhipinti (Master Management & Informatics), Amirehsan Davoodi and Hrishikesh Gupta (both enrolled in the Master in Artificial Intelligence), and Anna Sasso (Master in Marketing).

The product that the team of USI students is developing is a system based on Cat-M1 technology for the remote monitoring of patients. The solution consists of a patch, which is applied to a patient’s chest and which collects biometric data, and of a software platform that processes sensor information, enabling the continuous monitoring of patients who are victims of particular cardiovascular conditions and are at risk of complications. The system gives both physicians and clinicians real-time access to the physical condition of their patients, wherever they are, so they can make better diagnoses, understand whether they have taken their prescribed medications regularly, and understand the impact they have on the body.

For information of UbiHealth: www.ubihealth.ch