Healthcare is going digital worldwide at an incredibly rapid pace. More and more applications for prevention, diagnostics and therapy are being made into apps (with matching hardware) for smartphones and tablets or are even available as wearables for direct use on the body. Digitalization is also striding forward in Germany, where doctors, therapists and patients still take a fairly analogue approach compared to the rest of the world. People with health insurance may even be entitled to digital applications now. This is stated in the German Digital Care Act (DVG). A draft of this act will be introduced in the Bundestag (German Federal Parliament) and the Bundesrat (Federal Council of Germany) soon.

An overview of the benefits that digital health applications and their paired medical technology are already providing will be offered by the leading international medical trade fair MEDICA with over 5,100 exhibitors from about 70 countries. The event will take place in Düsseldorf, Germany, from November 18 – 21, 2019. Start-ups will be given special attention. The number of start-ups at MEDICA has consistently increased over the past few years. Now, several hundred of these very young and mostly digitally driven companies come here to meet their international specialist audience and present their ideas and new innovations. A highlight will be the MEDICA DISRUPT pitches, to be held within the scope of the MEDICA CONNECTED HEALTHCARE FORUM, and more particularly in the MEDICA START-UP PARK (both in Hall 13).

A pioneering program at MEDICA DISRUPT

At MEDICA DISRUPT, exciting finals are on the program in the first two days of MEDICA, with each final involving 10 start-ups. On November 18, the 11th INNOVATION WORLD CUP will look at healthcare solutions in the IoT (Internet of Things). The world’s best health app will be awarded at the 8th MEDICA App COMPETITION on November 19.

There will also be a pioneering program at MEDICA DISRUPT. Starting at 3:00 pm on November 18, the focus will be on body augmentation: the optimization of the human body using robotics, 3D printing and intelligent implants. One participant will be the start-up Ebenbuild. Dr. Kei W. Müller (CEO) has been performing research for a project that aims to provide patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) with individually tailored mechanical ventilation settings for their ventilators in order to improve their chances of survival and recovery. He has been working on this for twelve years. Up until now, ventilators could only be adjusted to patients in a very limited manner by inputting body parameters that tend to be imprecise (e.g. weight). Ebenbuild wants to change that with software that uses CT scanning and machine learning to produce a virtual patient-specific model of the lungs, thus creating a digital model (a digital twin). This enables automated, personalized and precise prediction of optimal ventilation for that patient.

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