AlphaLab startup using AI to prevent drug addicts from relapsing

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Just last week, President Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic a national public health emergency. With a heroin addict relapse rate of 90 percent and a 650 percent increase in emergency room visits for the drug since 1990, said Jeremy Guttman, there must be some pattern.

Technology could help disrupt such tragedy, the entrepreneur said. His startup, Behaivior, uses pattern-recognition machine learning to predict and prevent relapse and overdose through Fitbit-like wearables.

A device detects heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, motion and stress response, combining with other data like GPS location.

“Today is a new era in proactive relapse prediction with behavior,” he said while on stage during AlphaLab’s Demo Day Thursday night. “We are now able to detect that someone in recovery is in a red-alert craving, obsession phase.”

Demo Day, a sort of graduation ceremony for startup companies churning out of East Libertybased software accelerator program AlphaLab, featured seven companies from the summer 2017 cohort. Each early-stage company explained its product, market fit and revenue model before a packed audience at Stage AE on the North Shore. While not directly intended as a funding event, Demo Day typically attracts potential partners and investors.

The night’s companies offered a “glimpse into the future,” said Rich Lunak, president and CEO of Innovation Works, an earlystage investment program that runs AlphaLab. He added that 30 investment firms from China were in attendance for the presentations.

“We’re thrilled to show them what the Pittsburgh startup community is all about.”

Stitchbridge, another presenting startup, includes a team of virtual reality developers who suggest the relatively new technology has been underused in corporate environments, where simulated scenarios could prove fruitful in training.

“The VR [business-to-business] market is set to hit $16 billion by 2025,” said Sarabeth Boak, co-founder of Stitchbridge. “There’s untapped potential for how businesses can use 360 video.”

She did note obstacles. Looking around through a VR viewer can feel passive, in some cases, and not all firms have employees who know how to code. With Stitchbridge, though, no coding is necessary. Applications can be built to integrate VR with a user’s choices, collecting that data and deploying to mobile devices.

Other graduating companies included Honeycomb Credit, which bridges the gap between traditional banking and crowdfunding for small businesses; Music Everywhere, a platform using augmented reality to teach people to play music; Pixel AI, an e-commerce solution to help businesses find hidden behavioral patterns in consumers; Sparket, an on-demand business for selling used smart devices; and Watt-Learn, a company using artificial intelligence to maximize the longevity of a grid-connected storage system.

New this year, another eight companies — including businesses as disparate as former AlphaLab child care startup Flexable and the publicly traded simulation software engineering firm Ansys — also took the stage to pitch their newest products.

Of note, Meter Feeder introduced a product to help governments accept digital payments for parking without fully overhauling existing infrastructure. The company’s pay-by-vehicle product allows drivers to pay for parking, automatically, by simply turning off their cars.

I AM Robotics introduced its latest material-handling robot for order fulfillment, which is set for use in warehouses to improve manufacturing and logistics operations.

Fisherman data platform Anglr, Simcoach Games, Stocksnips and Travelwits also presented.

Applications for AlphaLab’s spring 2018 cohort are due by the end of January.