One-line solution summary:
Gamification of self-health interactions through real-time monitoring of diabetic conditions with wearables
Pitch your solution.
About one per six people in Puerto Rico have diabetes with 20% having vascular ulcers and 85% resulting in amputations. Co-quí is a social, educational, and gaming platform that combines wearable technology with an AI-based social platform educating users about diabetes through Q&A with health care providers, caregivers, and patients. Co-quí informs users about improved foot care through live feedback and reinforces improved eating habits while overlaying geography with local restaurant meals and rewards and the impact on glucose levels. Co-quí is expected to revolutionize diabetic foot care minimizing 85% of diabetic-driven amputations in PR today.
Take the data from your foot care in-sole and glucose monitoring device and see your performance relative to other users. Interrogate foot ulcer and glucose data, add your insulin in-take inputs or fight or eat donuts in a game to see how your foot health and glucose data change. Co-quí empowers your every step.
What specific problem are you solving?
3.2 million people of Puerto Rico suffer from high poverty and high unemployment rates due to COVID with about 40% of the population living below the poverty line. Hurricanes and earthquakes have over the past four years impacted the island outside of the impact from the pandemic creating a larger gap in socio-economic divide heavily impacting health and wellness.
About one out of every six people in Puerto Rico has diabetes making up 16% of the adult population and diabetes is considered the third cause of death in Puerto Rico.
Fifteen to twenty-five percent of diabetic patients have vascular ulcers and diabetic foot complications which is the cause of 85% amputations. Professional health care targeted at vascular disease is not sufficiently staffed in Puerto-rico making an improvement or active monitoring of leg and foot-health in Puerto Rico even more challenging.
Co-quí is trying to democratize diabetic health and in particular foot-health and glucose monitoring through gamification incentivizing users to improve their health and be rewarded every step of the way.
What is your solution?
Take the data from your foot-ulcer monitoring shoe in-sole and interstitial fluid device for glucose and see your performance as compared to other users or simulated bots. Look at your foot and glucose data, add your insulin in-take inputs or fight or eat donuts or cakes in a gaming engine to see how your foot and glucose data changes. Winning is keeping your foot and glucose at a level better than other players or the computer bots. The AI-based gaming environment learns your personal eating habits and gaming health behaviors to help educate and motivate you to improve your health along the way.
Our game overlaps your geographical area highlighting food options from restaurants and cafes incentivizing you to eat healthy through reward.
Healthcare providers pay a subscription fee to access data from our consumer for research and improved health recommendations for acute and pre-acute diabetic patients.
Co-quí is an open-source game-changing, interactive and real-time diabetes education and holistic care solution intersecting wearables and gaming targeting a Puerto-rican consumer-base while democratizing diabetic education
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Population in Puerto Rico with diabetes is 50% higher than the general population of U.S. Many doctors and specialists, 60% of total doctors on the island, left the island after hurricane Maria due to the devastation from the hurricane. Puerto Rico has a population of about 3.19 million and about 16% of the adult population has diabetes. We are hoping to address over one-hundred thousand patients with an initial focus on diabetic foot-care and ulcers that translate to amputations.
Co-quí is endeavoring to partner with Escuela de Medicina San Juan Bautista medical school and University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez to engage medical students, college students and physicians focusing on diabetic care and in particular podiatry care focused on diabetes patients. We are hoping to team up with Project Hope which focuses on helping the diabetic health crisis in Puerto Rico.
We are actively partnered with a flextrapower and 22ai and actively engaged with schools and medical practitioners in Puerto Rico.
Which dimension of the TPrize Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Support teachers and educational institutions with teaching and learning methodologies, tools, and resources that help develop future skills for studentsExplain how the problem you are addressing, the solution you have designed, and the population you are serving align with the TPrize Challenge.
Co-qui provides awareness and teaches users how to work with wearables data in relation to diabetes health monitoring. Users play the game, review and manipulate the data and see how changes in behavior influences gaming outcomes. Users can export and analyze data and understand sensing technologies leveraged. Users learn how to improve either the data or the sensing platform as part of a larger goal outside of health and wellness to promote STEAM.
Our collaborative environment provides feedback to consumers, health care providers and teachers endorsing action-learning in STEAM, health, wearables and diabetes at large.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
New York, NY, USAWhat is your solution’s stage of development?
Prototype: A venture or organization building and testing its product, service, or business model.Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution.
Flextrapower is an an award-winning technology company with product offerings in Asia, and several pilot partners in North America, and stage 2 prototypes to correlate and add other sensing mechanisms to our platform. Co-quí is a game-changing, interactive and real-time diabetes education and holistic care solution intersecting foot-care wearables from flextrapower, a socially optimized engagement platform from 22ai and gamification targeting a Puerto-rican consumer-base.
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Christy Fernandez-Cull
What makes your solution innovative?
Co-quí provides a social, educational and gaming platform focused on using a novel, low-cost scalable hardware solution providing real-time diabetes analytics to drive the democratization of diabetic education, foot health, and healthier eating habits.
Through gamification we improve awareness to improved diabetic health while incentivizing healthier habits through rewards and improving access to health data for researchers, students and health care providers to learn, understand, interpret and provide suggestions for improved patient health. There's a deficit in health care providers and we want to enable global access to health care data, health care advice and data analytical learnings.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
Co-quí is partnered with Flextrapower which is a key hardware solution that actively monitors foot ulcers through a custom in-sole.
Co-qui is also partnered with 22ai which serves as an optimized social platform connecting health care providers, patients, students, and Co-quí users alike so that data can be freely shared, analyzed and triaged as quickly as possible to improve user foot health and diabetic care.
Gamification incentivizes both health care providers, pre- and post-acute patients alike to eat healthy through financial gains and/or rewards.
Provide evidence that this technology works. Please cite your sources.
Flextrapower has already been working with MetLife and provides a solution for middle income class but can translate technology and pricing to other socio-economic groups.
Flextrapower is actively running their alpha test in Vietnam with a $500/year price point across two-thousand customers. The total addressable market in Vietnam is 12 million acute diabetes patients already at risk of amputation. Comparatively speaking each amputation costs about USD 253k.
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
Does this technology introduce any risks? How are you addressing or mitigating these risks in your solution?
There are privacy risks associated with geographical localization, health data, use of wearables, sharing of health (HIPAA). We will address these risks through pre-existing partnerships with medical facilities and health care providers. We will also endeavor to partner with local medical schools in San Juan. Christy Cull has access already to medical schools and universities and diabetic health care providers in the area.
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
In which countries do you currently operate?
How many people does your solution currently serve? How many will it serve in one year? In five years?
Current alpha testing through Flextrapower in Vietnam addresses about 1-2 thousand customers. However, the Toal addressable Vietnam population is 12M people with acute diabetes already at high risk of amputations. The cost per year is about USD$500 per year including hardware and subscription for in-sole replacement. In-soles do not need to be recharged as they are single use per three months when they are replaced.
In five years, we hope to capture and additional 10% of the market; however, in Vietnam cost minimizes our ability to capture the total addressable market. This is an area of focus and progress.
What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and -- importantly -- how will you achieve them?
We will continue to apply our Co-quí ecosystem approach, social, gaming, technological, to scale for low-cost, repeatable, and reliable solution to revolutionize diabetic foot care and wellness across socioeconomic barriers. We are currently only tackling two-thousand out of a total addressable market of 12M potential users.
In Puerto Rico acute diabetes is at a crisis due to the pandemic, environmental disasters, and a 65% reduction in access to diabetes healthcare providers. One in six people in Puerto Rico have diabetes and there are 3.2 million people in Puerto Rico. About 100k of the population have acute diabetes leading to foot ulcers.
Our goal for the next year is to continue to scale in Vietnam while lowering cost by a factor of five which is achievable. Our alpha solution in Vietnam drives the ability to extend to a pilot in Puerto Rico which allows us to test our gamification and social platform ecosystem for impacting diabetic induced foot ulcers and amputations. In five years, we extend and prove out our educational platform, user-base and low cost technology base at scale with a high-value in data sharing across over 5M users.
To reach our goals we will pursue partnerships in Puerto Rico and New York beyond existing ties to MetLife, NYU Lagone, and WL gore. We will work toward closing out partnership discussions with Escuela de Medicina San Juan Bautista medical school and University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez to further facilitate access to pre- and post-acute diabetic patients in Puerto Rico.
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
Our key performance indicators include our username, efficacy of care, efficacy of physician and patient feedback of comfort, foot ulcer mitigation and ultimately reduction in amputations which translates to saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical care.
Measure of progress is also an assessment of our supply chain and ability to reduce cost so that we can address a larger set of socio-economic groups thereby democratizing diabetic health information and hardware solutions alike. Measure of success includes understanding operations management and supply chain challenges for reducing size, cost, and weight. Similarly, we monitor the repeatable and reliability of the process from component-level inputs to outputs and user-experience at the use-case level.
How many people work on your solution team?
24-35
How long have you been working on your solution?
5+ years
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
We have medical professionals as advisors in the diabetic and general health care space, vascular surgeon as an advisor.
Existing partnerships across medical health care, and hospitals.
What is your approach to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive leadership team?
Encouraging the team to uplifting, embrace and amplify each others differences. Proactively ask for feedback across team meetings, milestones, and areas of improvement. Hire and encourage the hiring team to focus on candidates addressing needs of the organization but being led by passion and interest in counteracting diabetes foot ulcers and amputations at a national and global level at large based on an innate interest to help change the world and democratize health care solutions and information awareness about diabetes foot care.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)What organizations would you like to partner with, and how would you like to partner with them?
Co-quí is endeavoring to partner with Escuela de Medicina San Juan Bautista medical school and University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez to engage medical students, college students and physicians focusing on diabetic care and in particular podiatry care focused on diabetes patients. We are hoping to team up with Project Hope which focuses on helping the diabetic health crisis in Puerto Rico.
Solution Team
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Christy Fernandez-Cull PhD Co-quiu3
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Linh Le Founder, CEO , Flextrapower
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Solution Name:
Co-quí