Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COMAWARE (COMmunication and Assessment With Adaptive Realtime Environments)
Reporting period: 2014-10-01 to 2015-03-31
Imagine being completely unable to move. You can hear, feel, and think – but cannot speak, control any muscles, or communicate in any way. You may hear doctors, family members, and friends discuss end-of-life decisions for you, on the (mistaken) assumption that you are comatose, vegetative, or otherwise unable to make this decision on your own. Recent work has shown that up to 42% of such patients have been misdiagnosed, creating an urgent ethical need to help these patients as well as an opportunity for a new product. This is the context that led to the ComaWare project.
ComaWare had the following objectives: (1) Evaluate a new service and associated product line, through formal research and informal discussions and surveys; (2) Produce a business plan and (3) position G.TEC to quickly and effectively exploit any resulting opportunities in Phase II. These objectives focused on G.TEC’s new ComaWare system. This is a complete hardware and software platform that can monitor patients‘ brainwaves to assess consciousness and provide communication. ComaWare helped G.TEC evaluate the potential through a business plan and feasibility assessment that provided further details and new ideas to maximize the impact.
ComaWare had the following objectives: (1) Evaluate a new service and associated product line, through formal research and informal discussions and surveys; (2) Produce a business plan and (3) position G.TEC to quickly and effectively exploit any resulting opportunities in Phase II. These objectives focused on G.TEC’s new ComaWare system. This is a complete hardware and software platform that can monitor patients‘ brainwaves to assess consciousness and provide communication. ComaWare helped G.TEC evaluate the potential through a business plan and feasibility assessment that provided further details and new ideas to maximize the impact.
Most of the work focused on our feasibility assessment and business plan. This work included tasks such as background research, surveys, technical assessments, consulting with outside experts, and field validation with patients through hospital colleagues. Based on the resulting information, we decided to expand our approach, mainly by including new tools for prediction and rehabilitation. We addressed issues such as production costs, pricing models, intellectual property (IP) protection, marketing, certification, challenges in different regions, and a new business called ComaWARE-Aid to provide support to ComaWAre users.
The main final result of ComaWare is a better understanding of the opportunities and needs relating to sysetm, and how to best improve and sell the system and future ComaWare-Aid business. This new understanding will help us improve this system and business to better meet patients‘ needs. The potential impact is quite high: a new opportunity for tens of thousands of patients to once again be heard and convey their basic needs. ComaWare has also contributed to EU dominance in a new, high-tech field that is rapidly gaining attention worldwide.