Neculai Mindru, member of ROHEALTH, one of the 9 finalists in the HealthCare Lab competition

24-12-2021 By RoHealth So far there are no comments

Neculai Mîndru and his colleagues have created a portable medical device for the recovery of joints that takes over the repetitive work of therapists and that can recover up to three joints: elbow, knee, ankle. The device will have three functions: continuous passive mobilization, angle of motion measurement and active motion with resistance.

The Synovius device was presented by Neculai Mîndru, a member of ROHEALTH - Cluster for Health and Bioeconomy, at the competition organized in the fall of 2021 by HealthCare Lab, a business acceleration program for medical startups in Central and Southern Europe.

Mr. Mîndru was ranked among the 9 finalists who will participate in a business mentoring program. The project with which he applied was included in the section "identification of digital technologies for better disease monitoring".

Mr. Mîndru is a graduate of Ioan Cuza University in Iasi, holds a master's degree in medical recovery, with experience in the field working both in Romania and in France.

It took two years for the team of specialists in medical recovery, psychology, IT, and product design, to get from idea to prototype. Now its members are eager to have their own start-up in order to continue their research and develop the product. They also benefited from mentoring from a large pharmaceutical company as winners of Hackathon 4health in 2020. The team also won three other competitions, and Neculai Mîndru has been was a member of the jury at the Innovation Labs 2021 edition.

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HealthCare Lab is an international program that accelerates and supports the implementation of digital technology projects for the medical sector in the field of start-ups, with the mission to connect, support, and nurture an international innovation community of innovators, researchers, healthcare providers, and regulators to meet the biggest challenges in the medical sector.

The program is powered by Roche Group, EIT Health - Europe's largest network of health innovators, supported by the European Union-funded Center for Innovation and Technology (EIT), and run by innovation experts from Civitta. More than 50 experts and mentors at the European level are supporting this program.

For the HealthCare Lab program, three strategic directions have been identified for the health sectors in Central and Southern Europe that can be addressed through digital start-ups:

• Healthcare Data Management
• Screening and Early Diagnostics
• Digital Therapeutics and Disease management

In the autumn of 2021, 200 teams from the 16 Central and Southern European countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Czech Republic, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Hungary) have applied to the competition. To be eligible, candidate companies had to have a team of at least two people, a functional prototype matching one of the three strategies, and by the time they entered the competition did not attract more than $ 5 million of Euro for investment.

Only 20 teams have been qualified for the pitch session. In the end, nine teams were chosen, two of them from Romania. In 2022 during 3 months, the finalists will participate in an acceleration program that means workshops, business coaching sessions, meetings with industry specialists, personalized mentoring from over 30 experts in the health business, all these covering a variety of topics, from business validation to sales and regulation. After this preparation period, the competitors will present their project/start-up again, and the winner will receive 10,000 Euros.