Tech Talks Central

Alex Itsios, Team Manager and Konstantinos Koliousis, Design & UI/UX at Healthy Club introduce us to a very simple, professional meal & exercise planning platform for nutritionists, trainers, gymnasts, clinicians & research centers enabling them to look after their clients in a revolutionary new way and stay close to them at all times. The biggest asset of their platform is the meal planner, which exploits a preexisting database of foods and supplements, allowing clients to achieve easily better performance in their health goals. The project is unique in Greece, created from scratch with only 2 competitors internationally, as they say. Interviewed by Katerina Giosma for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Zetta Korda and Anaxagoras Fotopoulos, two members of the Ingredio team (Dr. Zoe Kournia, the founder and CEO was not available at the time of this interview) explain how their mobile app works: a simple scanning of the ingredient label, on a cosmetic product or food package, with a smartphone camera is all you need in order to check for the toxicity of ingredients correlated with official databases provided by the World Health Organization and the European Commission. This free app (or on a budget subscription for heavier use) presents the toxicity grade of each sole ingredient and overall for the product, helping users and customers make healthy informed decisions about the products they buy. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Katerina Exakoustidou Co-Founder of Vitabroad talks about their full-service facilitator for medical tourism in Greece, which creates personalised medical travel plans, including healthcare services, accommodation, travel tickets, wellness and tourism services for international patients seeking treatment. The quality of their services is ensured, as she points out, stemming from established partnerships with European & American board certified physicians, as well as national and international accredited Greek private, for the time being, hospitals and clinics. Interviewed by Katerina Giosma for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Vangelis(or Vangos) Pterneas, honoured by Microsoft with the title of Most Valuable Professional for his contributions to the technical community and CTO of Kinetisense, explains the impact their product has in motion analysis for patients and clinicians and how they use Microsoft Kinect to accomplish it. Kinetisense is a real-time motion analysis tool for practitioners, physiotherapists and personal trainers. It can analyse the range of motion for the patient’s shoulders, the back, the elbows and the knees allowing the practitioner to understand the improvement (or not) in motion. Kinetisense is useful to clinicians but also to athletes and even dentists, as Vangos explains, due to posture change after dental surgery. He goes on to talk about the rest of the team and the funding the Canadian company has received. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Nikos Naoum, Head of Product and Co-founder at Blueline talks about their mobile app, a real time on demand matchmaking-tool which connects patients and doctors. Although the app has competition they believe that following the ‘Uber’ model of allowing doctors to show real-time their availability, they will be able to serve patients within 2 hours but also motivate doctors to join since this will mean customers for them, exactly when they need them. The team is looking into collaborations with hotels and tourist offices in order to get access to tourists who usually have a hard time finding an available doctor in a foreign country. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central during the eHealth Forum Festival in Technopolis, October 2016.

Do we know how to use our health data and what are the best choices for us? Although we often hear about patient empowerment, are we literate enough to understand what our health data mean? Three health IT professionals have set out to open this conversation, and while during eHealth Week they presented their first panel discussion on the Digital Health Compass, as they have named their quest, we thought we’d ask in person what they aim to accomplish. Anne Moen - President at the European federation for Medical Informatics & Professor at the University of Oslo, Catherine Chronaki - Secretary General for the HL7 Foundation, and Ed Hammond - Director for the Duke Center for Health Informatics & Chai

Steve Lieber, President & CEO of HIMSS, talks about HIMSS, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting a better understanding of health care information and management systems. He explains who their audience is and what kind of services they provide their community. We ask him if they’re working on behavioural change for clinicians and how difficult it is to keep up with the constant changes in informatics and educating their audience. HIMSS started out in the US but during the last years it has been branching out into Europe and Asia. It’s interesting to hear about their approach to growth. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Henrique Martins, President of the SPMS board talks about the NHS implemented services they’re working on in Portugal. He discusses their choices and how these have changed the citizens perception about the NHS. He talks about paperless health; the Open Data portal and its APIs the death certificate connected with the system to avoid fraud; public access to data; their developer community and mobile apps, like the waiting time for a hospital appointment. Most importantly, he elaborates on how by exposing their data they have opened themselves to scrutiny but in the meantime also added significant pressure on providing quality of data and overall efficiency. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Tapani Piha, Head of eHealth Unit in the European Commission discusses eHealth and the European Commission, and how it facilitates member states to learn from each other in order to stimulate growth and development. Mr. Piha participated in the eHealth Network meeting during the eHealth Week, so we asked him how he sees member states performing when it comes to eHealth. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Clemens Martin Auer, Chair for the eHealth Network & Director General at the Ministry of Health in Austria, sat down with us and discussed the outcomes of the 7th annual eHealth Network meeting in Amsterdam, during the eHealth Week. He explains what the objectives of this European Commission voluntary Network, of national authorities responsible for eHealth, are and how they try to accomplish them. The eHealth Network draws up guidelines in the area of eHealth aiming to enhance interoperability between electronic health systems and continuity of care and to ensure access to safe and quality healthcare. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

During the last 2 years we’ve seen several IoT development platforms spring up and they all strive to be the common ground that every IoT app and device will hook up to. Meanwhile, every large IT company is hasty to join, since it still remains foggy which will prevail. This time we decided to interview an Open standards solution, the EU funded IOT open platform, UniversAAL, a free and open enabler for rapid development & deployment of interoperable IoT application that enrich human lives, as their moto says. Saied Tazari - Associated Head, Pilar Sala - Technical Manager, Bruno Jean Bart - Director of Innovation Social at UniversAAL and Homer Papadopoulos, Senior Research Manager at NCSR Demokritos explain what the platform has to offer, compared to other proprietary solutions, and how their main focus now is to develop the market place. They analyse a few case studies, while emphasising on the adaptability and advantages of the platform. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Yvonne Goff - Chief Clinical Information Officer & Richard Corbridge - Chief Information Officer, at the Health Service Executive from the Republic of Ireland, discuss the Irish health ecosystem. Richard talks about their eHealth agenda, Knowledge and Information Plan, e-referrals, the individual health identifier along with other achievements; while Yvonne explains how different stakeholders came together to implement the eHealth agenda. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Hans Notenboom, Global Head of Digital at Philips Healthcare discusses Philips positioning when it comes to health care. They had a dominant presence during the eHealth Week, something to be expected considering Philips is a Dutch company. Hans talked about Philip’s market share in healthcare, its future plans and technologies like it’s portable ultrasound solution, marketed around a subscription model; VR in surgery room planning and design; healthcare & wellness devices and more. He also talks about Philips’ open platform that can accumulate data from several health sources. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Petra Wilson, an experienced legal consultant on EU health directives & regulations, and Director of Health Connect Partners explains the new General Data Protection Regulation (lovingly known as GDPR). Adopted on the 27th of April 2016 it will be applied on the 25th of May 2018, after a two-year transition period, and unlike a Directive it does not require any enabling legislation to be passed by governments. The European Commission intends to strengthen and unify data protection for individuals and to address export of personal data outside the EU. The Commission's primary objectives of the GDPR are to give citizens back the control of their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU. Petra breaks down it’s 8 key points emphasizing on its most important aspects, while she explains what companies and institutions need to focus on and how they can prepare. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

The team got together to discuss podcasting and its intricacies. Prior to sitting in front of our microphones, we interviewed Stathis Koutsogeorgos - founder at Radiojar - and included snippets of his interview in our podcast. We discussed live shows vs podcasts and what each one entails; why TTC chooses to do both depending on circumstances; the minimal equipment required to do a good-quality audio interview on the move, and what are the available podcast media hosts and distribution channels. We pondered on the optimal podcast duration, how to disseminate and finally what kind of innovation can we expect in podcasting for the future. Markos, our sound engineer was kind enough to prepare a post with a list on audio equipment, we at TTC, either use or suggest derived from our experience on doing interviews on the move and broadcasting live from events. https://medium.com/tech-talks-central/podcasting-equipment-for-various-budgets-c9f0f2774010#.p85lv65tw TTC people on the TTCvoice#4 podcast were Vagelis A

Having an interview with a London-based VC was pretty exciting as for the European startup ecosystem London is the closest thing to Silicon Valley. Axel Wehr who is Partner at Firestartr and previously an Associate in Bain Capital’s private equity group introduced us to Firestartr and to which verticals and regions they focus in. He mentions some factors of their investment strategy and why they believe that there is room for European unicorns. Apart from the capital, a VC should help and support its startups and Axel explains how they do that. Compared to the US startup ecosystem, Europe is showing progress but lacks of experienced capital, meaning teams and people that have successfully done that before. Closing he talks about some promising startups that are funded and supported by Firestartr. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central.

Their “love story” started back in the 90s, when Angelos Vourlidas went to the States initially to study black holes - he chose the Sun, instead, fascinated by the only source of heat and light for our planet. Angelos talks about his job and explains the grave consequences of solar activity and “winds” in our daily life; he asserts that the Sun hides a lot of secrets from us and never stops changing. He says that there is still a long way for the prediction of solar weather and shares with us the news that, in about two years from now, a special spacecraft will be sent for the first time inside the atmosphere of the Sun to record and send back valuable data. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

When he was only 12, Dimitri Chatzis built his own large 3D printer that he consequently used to build, two years later, a big humanoid and highly sophisticated talking robot. “Troopy” is one of the only six similar robots -based on the InMoov ecosystem- in the world. Dimitri is from the northern Greek town of Kavala and still a freshman in High School. He travelled to Athens, along with his robot “Troopy”, in order to take part in the Athens Science Festival during 2016 and found the time to talk to us about his passion for robotics, his love for research and his plans for the future. We’re pleased to say that “Troopy” contributed to the interview with a few words of his own. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Dr. Michail Bletsas, Research Scientist & the Director of Computing at MIT’s Media Lab was one of the founding members of the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ initiative, in 2005. He is a strong proponent of Connectivity, as he considers it is as necessary as our water supply; it provides the basis for communication, which he firmly believes distinguishes us humans from other complex species on this planet; it acted as the primary catalyst to help us “invent” social networking, law, religion, democracy and currency. He talks about the emerging, telephony and mobile, convergence; the EU and USA research environments versus that of China’s, and how the latter’s lack of institutions may prove critical in the failure or success equation. Finally, he discusses the OLPC legacy, as the result of an elaborate demo, conducted by MIT, ever. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

As a Lord of the Rings fan... Netbeast fits the“One platform to control them all” description, meaning that Netbeast will be able to control all your smart and connected devices through one app. Co-founders Jon Senra Dearle, CEO & Jesus Dario Rivera, CTO at Netbeast share their story and the startup’s journey up to now. You will listen to what IoT challenges they are tackling and a brief concern about privacy and security. One of the highlights of the interview is when they explain how one can actually create an ideal wake up morning call thanks to Netbeast and smart devices. They discuss the similarities, the differences and the progress of the startup ecosystems in Spain and Germany. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central.