Imagine Cup Winners Bringing Healthcare into Homes

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We see some familiar faces in the news recently! The Australian winners of Microsoft Imagine Cup 2012 have gotten a step closer to their dream of bringing healthcare into the home, with their startup CliniCloud announcing a partnership with American company Doctor On Demand earlier this May to improve remote healthcare services in the United States of America (USA).

 

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Microsoft Imagine Cup 2012 winners and CliniCloud founders, Hon Weng Chong and Andrew Lin [L-R]. Image: CliniCloud

 

Andrew Lin, 27, and Hon Weng Chong, 28, won the Microsoft Imagine Cup in 2012 by developing an app that helps in detecting childhood pneumonia, an illness that kills more children than measles, malaria and HIV combined. When used together with a digital stethoscope plugged into a smartphone, the app will identify symptoms and signs of childhood pneumonia based on the World Health Organization’s diagnostics manual and analysis of the data the app gathered.

Following their win, the two went on to found CliniCloud, a startup providing consumer-friendly medical kits that, when paired with an intuitive smartphone app, allow users to monitor body conditions from home. This medical kit includes not only a market-ready version of the stethoscope based on the one they had initially developed during the competition, but also a non-contact thermometer that uses infrared sensors to collect temperature readings. The information the app gathers is stored on a secure cloud server and can be used for monitoring, review, and analysis by users. By enabling vital statistics to be collected at home, the pair hopes that their medical kits will eventually help streamline healthcare services, cutting down on waiting times and easing the high demand for healthcare.

 

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The CliniCloud medical kit and CliniCloud app. Image: CliniCloud

 

Their recent partnership with Doctor on Demand has pushed the capabilities of the CliniCloud app even further. Doctor on Demand enables patients around the USA to pay virtual visits to the doctor on their smartphones or browsers, giving those without easy access to medical services the help they need right from the comfort of their home. The CliniCloud app complements this service, taking it a step further by providing remote physicians critical information such as temperature, heart, and lung sounds via a platform, allowing diagnoses to be made—quickly and more accurately.

And this is just the start. CliniCloud, now a 20-person team, will continually improve the app, and add other personalised user responses such as reminders and prompts. They also hope to be able to sell their software to entities such as state healthcare departments in the future to help them gather data required for public health studies.

The developments CliniCloud has introduced so far have been great and we are excited to see what else the pair has in store for us. Congratulations CliniCloud on all your achievements since 2012 and we look forward to hearing from you again soon!

 

To find out more about CliniCloud, check out their website here .