The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Start-up bid to save lives looking for co-founders
Health: Patient monitoring initiative
A new start-up, which claims it could save lives in remote communities around the world by identifying disease sooner, is looking for co-founders to help evolve the future of patient monitoring technology.
Evolved Monitors aims to use clinical algorithms built into its remote-patient monitoring systems to analyse raw data – such as blood pressure, pulse rate and oxygenation levels.
This would allow minimally trained users to identify critical illness through its user interface without expert knowledge or experience. As a result, remote medics could be deployed more widely where the resource is needed most.
Nicholas Dillon, an associate lecturer at Aberdeen-based Robert Gordon University (RGU) and an experienced remote medic, is the founder of Evolved Monitors.
Now with an understanding of the business behind his vision, Mr Dillon is looking for additional co-founders to join him. He said: “Anybody with a passion for helping people and making a difference – you could be an accountant, a tech person or medical person – get in contact with me. It’s an opportunity to get involved at a grassroots level with something that could be big.”
He added: “We keep adding raw data to the screens of medical monitors like the electrocardiogram, and it’s quite a high skillset to analyse them. These machines are in a critical care ward where we have the smartest doctors and nurses already.
“We want to move that knowledge far, far forward into the hands of everyday users so we can start picking up on these illnesses at home and in remote areas because we realise early recognition of critical illness is key to survival.
“I teach remote healthcare internationally, often through language barriers, and have taught
“An opportunity to get involved at a grassroots level with something that could be big”
via translators and even mime. It really makes you get down to the basics of what people need to know and get rid of anything complicated.
“Using this concept, we’re taking what was a really high-end clinical skill and, through the combination of technology and user design, making it so anyone can see a problem hours before you’d normally pick it up.
“This is what we are doing in hospitals and it’s what paramedics are doing.
“Imagine having a device like that in a small village where it takes five days to walk to a hospital.”
Evolved Monitors is one of 25 businesses to successfully complete RGU’s Startup Accelerator programme, part of a suite of initiatives launched by RGU designed to promote entrepreneurship and strengthen the economy through the diversification of services and products.