AREA member Iristick selected as finalist for remote EHealth smartglasses
Fantastic news was announced this week for AREA member Iristick. The company has been selected as 1 of 23 finalists out of a pool of 615 applicants for their work on testing smart glasses that allow local health care workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo to receive real-time medical expertise remotely from doctors.
The Administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Honorable Mark Green, and the Secretary of State for the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom, The Right Honourable Penny Mordaunt, M.P., announced 23 intended finalists for Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge, at the 2018 edition of the Concordia Annual Summit in New York City.
The finalists emerged from a pool of 615 applications received from 86 countries – 48 percent of which came from lower-middle-income countries. About one-third of the applications involved projects led by women.
The finalists, who stand collectively to receive $5 million in funding, will now put their innovative ideas into action to implement solutions that will provide, supply, or generate locally safe drinking water and sanitation, energy, life-saving information, or health supplies and services to help the most-vulnerable and hardest-to-reach people affected by conflict.
Steven Serneels of Iristick commented:
“While breakthrough tech innovations, such as Iristick smart glasses, are great for Industry, they can, at the same time, also mean so much for society, addressing pressing societal needs such as creating access to high quality, affordable health care by leveraging the expertise of doctors in remote areas in the area of e-health.”
USAID and DFID, which launched Creating Hope in Conflict as a multi-organizational partnership, today announced an additional combined investment of $10 million. In addition, the Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands announced its commitment to join the partnership and invest $7.5 million in this effort, which brings the total contribution for the Humanitarian Grand Challenge to $32.5 million.
Grand Challenges Canada is implementing Creating Hope in Conflict on behalf of the investors. The new commitment by the Dutch Government and the announcement of the 23 intended finalists are a testament to the power of partnerships to bring organizations together to respond more nimbly to complex emergencies and empower people to create better lives for themselves.
The 23 selected seed projects will receive grants of up to $250,000 each over a maximum of twenty-four (24) months to support the validation and testing of new approaches. Final grants, subject to negotiation, will be signed later this year.
You may also like to see Iristick’s AREA member profile and the Iristick website