The $10.5 million investment will be distributed among four initiatives from Canadian firms that are attempting to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare by the Global Innovation Cluster for Digital Technologies (DIGITAL).
The projects’ goals are to employ AI to expedite clinical trials, enhance patient-doctor communication, enhance home care workers’ file management, and enhance wound care. The projects’ total estimated worth is $26 million, including investments from private sector partners and DIGITAL’s contribution.
In order to co-invest with industry partners to produce digital technologies through cooperative research and development, the federally-funded innovation clusters, such as DIGITAL, were established in 2017.
“Our government is committed to helping businesses and researchers have the tools they need to harness the power of AI, while ensuring the technology is safe and benefits Canadians,” François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, said in a statement. “This is why we are proud to support DIGITAL as it works to leverage AI to make significant advances in creating cutting-edge healthcare innovations that benefit all Canadians.”
The $9 million wound treatment project by Swift Medical, of which half is financed by the innovation cluster, is receiving the highest investment from DIGITAL. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), the Toronto-based company hopes to advance the use, assessment, and commercialization of its wound assessment, decision support, and predictive care solutions. The device eliminates the discomfort associated with manual measures by using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect the sorts of wounds, assess whether they are healing or deteriorating, and produce a 3D representation of the visible depth of the wound.
In January, Swift completed a $8 million USD funding round headed by the Women in Technology Venture Fund of BDC Capital.
Additionally, DIGITAL supported RxPx, a Vancouver-based company that presently offers solutions for managing diseases and individualized information to patients. The $10.5 million project, to which DIGITAL contributed $3.4 million, aims to create an integrated “AI Clinical Buddy System” with individualized onboarding and engagement capabilities to support patient enrollment, adherence, engagement, and monitoring in clinical trials.
The San Francisco-based, Canadian-founded Power recently secured $16.3 million CAD ($12 million USD) in Series A funding for its own platform, which aims to assist in matching more patients with appropriate clinical trials.
DIGITAL gave $1.5 million to Gotcare, a Toronto-based organization that matches patients with virtual and in-home care providers based on factors like location, specialization, language proficiency, and cultural awareness. Its $3.1 million project aims to improve its concept for a predictive health monitoring product and add AI capabilities to its virtual support and patient matching services.
In the last project, Montréal-based AlayaCare, which claims to be used by over 700 home care service providers in North America and Australia, will get $1.1 million from DIGITAL as it attempts to incorporate AI into its health record platform. The $3.2-million project intends to provide clinical supervisors and caregivers with decision support, risk dashboards, conversational capabilities, and natural language summarization.