COMmunication and Assessment With Adaptive Realtime Environments

Informations projet

COMAWARE

N° de convention de subvention: 650381

DOI

10.3030/650381

Projet clôturé

Date de signature de la CE 30 Septembre 2014

Date de début 1 Octobre 2014

Date de fin 31 Mars 2015

Financé au titre de

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Coût total

€ 71 429,00

Contribution de l’UE

€ 50 000,00

Coordonné par

GUGER TECHNOLOGIES OG
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COMAWARE (COMmunication and Assessment With Adaptive Realtime Environments)

Période du rapport: 2014-10-01 au 2015-03-31

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

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.

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

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.

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

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.

ComaWare system diagram

ComaWare screening result