#201 - Who doesn't love robots? 🤖
#201 - Who doesn't love robots? 🤖
The one-minute healthtech roundup
Hi friends,
This week: Building AI-powered robotic limbs, Waving ‘bye-bye’ to the gender health gap, and how do you find the right therapist for you?
Tired eyes? 👀 Listen to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Huw and Jess from SomX breakdown the best stories from this week’s newsletter, with help from University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire Trust’s, Dr Julia Dawson. Available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
News Bites 🥪
6️⃣ Priorities for an AI in health care strategy – Whoever happens to be running the country by the time this newsletter goes out (we write this on a Thursday, so who knows what will have happened?), a plan for how we intend to use AI to fix everything might be a good call. That means a dedicated strategy to coordinate the currently fragmented efforts across NHS England. This report by the Health Foundation outlines six key strategic priorities for getting there.
🚺 How is femtech helping us to resolve the gender health gap? – Women’s health technology is on the rise, much to Pigeon’s delight! It's about time, considering women's health has been underfunded and understudied for years. Fortunately, some fantastic companies are doing amazing work to address the gender inequality in healthcare.
🤨 The limits of fair medical imaging AI in real-world generalization – You know what they say, wAI is great and AI supporting clinicians do their jobs is even better. However, there's still a long way to go for AI in healthcare, especially when it comes to fairness and effectiveness across diverse clinical settings. For example, AI tends to use demographic shortcuts in disease classification, so there's clearly more work to be done here.
👏 Pain-free home test kit for cervical cancer is unveiled – Pigeon understands smear tests aren't many women’s favourite pastime. In fact, one-third of women in the UK miss their smear tests each year due to reasons like pain and body consciousness. However, a device developed by a postgraduate student might change that. This non-invasive, at-home test allows women to screen for cancer-causing HPV strains without the need for painful smear tests.
💰 Swedish mental health startup Meela raises €2.6M – Take it from Pigeon: a key part of therapy is finding the right therapist for you. The team at Meela knows this well. Their research-based matchmaking platform helps people find the perfect psychologist and therapy method and they’ve just raised a tidy sum to continue developing their services.
🦾 AI prosthetic limbs and advanced sensors: how one startup is building tech for next gen wearables – Pigeon has certainly heard it all now. Whilst an AI-assistant robotic arm sounds like something you would find in a sci-fi thriller it is in fact very real, and very useful. Ukrainian-US startup Esper is using their robotic arm as a testing platform to develop next-generation sensors for the mass market, which could be integrated into wearable devices or even implanted inside the body.
🕹️ Clinical simulation an opportunity to evaluate digital health technologies — What innovator wouldn’t want to prove their invention in an environment resembling the real thing, but where the risk was minimised? Ultimately, it’s a regulator’s dream, and one which could be a bit closer following a whitepaper that recommends how we progress the idea to reality for digital health technology assessments.
🫓 Digital health Q1 funding coasting at $1B as telehealth and digital therapeutics lose ground — Did it happen? Is this what ‘normal’ looks like for the healthtech funding market? More deals, smaller cheques, but ultimately, little change over three quarters means that, going forward, will we be more focused on the ‘hot niches’ rather than the sector’s overall health?
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
SomX Comms 102: Fundraising Essentials
🕣 Jul 11
📍 Online
BIA Summer Party 2024
🕣 Jul 11
📍 London
How to use Generative AI and Prompt Engineering for Clinicians - BMJ Group
🕣 Jul 17
📍 Online
AI in the NHS: Shaping the future of healthcare - The Health Foundation
🕣 Jul 18
📍 Online
Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup to see all of the best upcoming healthtech, biotech and healthcare events
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
☁️ Senior Node.js & Cloud Engineer, Isla Health — Do you love solving complex problems? Can you build a top-notch engineering team? Are you ready to lead the design, implementation, and evolution of scalable, secure, high-performance software solutions and cloud architecture to tackle healthcare challenges and improve patient care? If so, Pigeon has the perfect job for you!
🎨 Product Designer - Commercial, Flo Health – A product designer is a big role! If you're up for it, Flo is looking for someone skilled at creating exceptional human-centred experiences and capable of designing experiments and initiatives to enhance user experience and meet commercial objectives. Sound like you? You know what to do!
👷 Quality Assurance Automation Engineer, Skin Analytics – Pigeon’s buddies at Skin Analytics have a proposition for you. They need a highly skilled Automation QA Engineer with extensive experience in mobile and web automation testing. If you have a strong background in software quality assurance and can create and maintain automated test suites, they'd love to hear from you. In return, you'll get to work with a cool company doing even cooler things!
👩💻 Investment Manager Life Science and Medtech, Zinc – Zinc has built a successful venture builder ecosystem and they need someone to join their Health investment team. You'll support the entire investment pipeline, from sourcing and due diligence to building and growing medtech and life sciences founders and ventures. Interested? Apply today!
Got news, jobs or events you think is worth coo-ing over? Let us know! Email us: news@healthtechpigeon.com
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SomX is a communications and creative agency for healthcare. We are clinicians, scientists, creatives and communicators dedicated to serving our healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector clients with services across strategy, content, PR, design, events and media production. Get in touch to learn more.