Liber Health

The COVID pandemic has rendered existing identification methods like fingerprint and facial recognition useless owing to the risk of spreading the contagion with physical contact, and use of face masks.

To solve this problem and bring us back to some level of normalcy, we have created a safe and contactless IRIS recognition solution powered by AI and blockchain which identifies the person and measures their body temperature. If the solution detects a fever or symptom of COVID, it sends a notification to the concerned staff for action. We intend this solution to be the alternative to fingerprint attendance systems and the "first line of warning" against Coronavirus, specially for hospitals and millions of essential workers who cannot stay at home but need to be safe.

Patient misidentification is identified as a root cause of many medical errors, contributing to 134 million patient harm events and 2.6 million deaths each year around the world (https://www.who.int/patientsafety/en/). Which is why, correctly identifying patients is the Number 1 priority for both the Join Commission International (https://www.jointcommissioninternational.org/en/standards/international-patient-safety-goals/) and WHO's patient safety goals (https://www.who.int/patientsafety/solutions/patientsafety/PS-Solution2.pdf?ua=1).

The problem exists due to lack of proper patient identification methods, time pressure when treating patients and human errors (specially during emergencies). Current identification methods like patient wristbands only reduce the risk by 50%.

This is even worse for patient who need blood transfusions where 61% of all the errors are caused by patient misidentification (https://www.ecri.org/Resources/HIT/Patient%20ID/Patient_Identification_Evidence_Based_Literature_final.pdf).

And the problem is getting worse, for the first time in modern history we have come to realize how fragile is our current healthcare infrastructure. The hospitals are overwhelmed, there is immense time pressure on doctors and number of "second victims" are on the rise, these are doctors and relatives who get traumatized by losing patient specially due to such avoidable mistakes.

Its absolute chaos right now!

To solve these growing problems, we created SYBIL - SYstem for Biometric Identification and Linkage.

A global digital identity network powered by blockchain which uses a person's biometrics (IRIS scans) for identification, privacy and health data transfer. It even measures a person's body temperature and predicts lung tissue damage caused by COVID.

It is a combination of IoT devices, AI and blockchain applications which acts both as a stand-alone solution and also as an extension of the existing Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. 

It works by first allowing a person to enroll their iris through our IoT device. During the enrollment process, the person is asked to enter personal information like name, date of birth, ID number etc. All the information is then encrypted with the person's iris scans and stored on the blockchain. After the person is enrolled, the only way to decrypt and access their personal information and identity is when the person provides their iris scans again as form of consent. Since the identities are stored on the blockchain, they are available to the organizations who are part of the network but no one can decrypt or read the data.

We are currently deploying the system as an alternative to fingerprint identification and covid prescreening for healthcare staff, long term care centers and essential workers to provide them a safe working environment free from the risk of being infected. We have been conducting customer discovery interviews with healthcare providers in North America and UAE. We have already secured pilot projects with Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers (FQHC) in Chicago US, Niagara Falls Canada and in Dubai UAE.

We are piloting our technology as a covid prevention/prescreening solution for these organizations because that is the immediate pain for them right now. They need a solution which allows contactless identification and fever detection for their staff members. Right now, they are checking temperatures manually which is putting strain on the hospital staff, its financial resources and risks spreading the contagion.

After pilot, we will deploy our solution to scan all the visitors/patients for these organizations. This will provide further relief and help flatten the covid curve.

We will then combine patient iris scans with their medical records. This will allow us to reach ultimate goal of eradicating patient mis-identifications.

Interview recording with customers can be provided if required for evaluation.

Our alignment with this challenge is two folds; both short term and long term.

In the short term, we are flattening the curve by providing a safe contactless attendance system for healthcare and essential workers whose payrolls depend on check in/out times. And by prescreening people for covid symptoms upon entry to protect the remaining staff and create a safe working environment inside the facility.

In the long term, the solution will allow these healthcare stakeholders to work together and share health data securely via a trusted network. This will be instrumental in monitoring and tracking future outbreaks and pandemics.

Currently healthcare providers and health systems manufacturers use Enterprise Master Patient Indices (EMPIs) to maintain patient identities and match patients with the right medical records. The problem is, EMPIs use fuzzy logic to match patient medical records from different healthcare providers based on data like names, dates of birth, phone numbers, etc.

This approach is probabilistic at best—there are no guarantees. Even a simple data entry error may lead to the retrieval of some other patient’s medical history and related medical errors which can even lead to deaths.

To solve this problem, we created an IRIS-based identification solution which captures a person's IRIS scans and also their body temperature. We utilize a person's IRIS to establish their identity which far more unique than a fingerprint and we use Artificial Intelligence and our propriety algorithms for instant identification. To ensure optimal privacy, all the data is encrypted using the person's IRIS template saved on a permissioned blockchain network. We then bind this digital biometric identity with the pointers/locations of the clinical records. This creates a patient medical directory which is far superior than existing EMPI solutions because now their is no guess-work when identifying patients.

To make our solution even more unique and innovative, we employ Machine Learning to identify lung tissue damage caused by COVID via analyzing a person's iris scans. This approach combined with fever detection mentioned earlier, will make COVID pre-screening and prevention extremely effective and easy to access which is not possible with current available solutions.

The technologies involved in this project already exist and are being used in one form or the other. We combine these technologies with our own newly developed technology for superior privacy and security.

The practical implementation will include installing our hardware devices (which consist of IRIS scanners and body temperature sensors) at hospitals, offices and other organizations. The hardware devices will be 3D printed and put together by a third-party specializing in integrated circuits and hardware level programming. We have already begun this process for our pilot projects.

Once the hardware is deployed at any location, it connects with the internet and starts sending data back and forth to our servers (which are currently in cloud but can also be on-premise). The on-site device sends IRIS scan and temperature reading to our servers where we use the IRIS scans to recognize the person with our AI solution and decrypt their data stored on the blockchain. Our AI then checks for COVID symptoms and sends the data to hardware device and the organization administration for their records. 

All the software implementation, including the AI and blockchain is being developed in-house by us. We have already built the global digital identity blockchain network powered by AI and IRIS scans.

For a high-level understanding, we planned the following phases

Phase 1: Hardware deployment

Phase 2: Give admins the online portal to monitor check in/out plus possible fever.

Phase 3: Introduce AI-based COVID pre-screening

Following is the earlier demo of a version of the technology before we added the temperature sensing technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWLBdEfyp6U. The video is nothing fancy but does explain the core concept of the technology.

Iris recognition is widely becoming accepted for authorization, specially in its implementation in Smartphones and Border-Control (Immigration Process).

Here are some of the academic papers/patents highlighting its uses,

Iris recognition system (https://patents.google.com/patent/US4641349A/en)

Biometric personal identification system based on iris analysis (https://patents.google.com/patent/US5291560A/en)

Enhancing iris recognition system performance using templates fusion (https://drive.google.com/file/d/13MRRsH_Bq1Idxo9BmNRljlO07bHSA0oS/view?usp=sharing)

An Efficient and Robust Iris Segmentation Algorithm Using Deep Learning (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Yo88HnzyIVTuxr2vilVwjvY-yuP-COhK/view?usp=sharing)

DeepIris: Iris Recognition Using A Deep Learning Approach (https://drive.google.com/file/d/18gy0w93bxmrdyi9cdbmhQkiYlO4x5jyG/view?usp=sharing)

Link to the (award winning) medically certified temperature sensor being used for fever detection (https://www.melexis.com/en/product/MLX90632/Miniature-SMD-Infrared-Thermometer-IC)

Academic paper for lung tissue damage detection via Iris,

Lung Disorders Detection Based On Irises Image Using Computational Intelligent Art (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Pp0Kygn99-vFiE4Krd29143Z4ML-UhbT/view?usp=sharing)

An Iris based Lungs Pre-diagnostic System (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y-mWzhvz7MAZ-ytuToHwp3IK0COF8FxV/view?usp=sharing)

Liber Health provides a global digital identity network powered by blockchain and biometrics. It uses IRIS scans for citizen identification, privacy and health data transfer. We also provide IoT devices which measure fever, identify COVID symptoms via AI-based Iris analyses and provide an alternative to fingerprint identification access control which risks spreading the contagion with physical contact. (https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-temperature-checks) (https://www.biometricupdate.com/202006/the-many-benefits-of-contactless-biometric-acquisition-and-authentication-technologies-in-covid-19-era)

Our immediate goal is to provide a safe working environment (free of covid) for healthcare staff and essential workers. As highlighted in Washington Post, Next to health-care providers, no workforce has proved more essential during the novel coronavirus pandemic than the 3 million U.S. grocery store employees. Many report being stressed and scared, especially as their colleagues fall ill to the highly contagious coronavirus that is responsible for more than 21,000 deaths in the United States alone. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/12/grocery-worker-fear-death-coronavirus/)

Another major goal is to allow healthcare stakeholders to be able to work together for patient safety and empowerment by allowing secure and instant health data exchange. (https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/improved-interoperability-key-managing-covid-19-spread) (https://blog.stibosystems.com/gambling-with-patient-identity)

In long term, this will lead to better collaborations and research opportunities among these organizations and better population level health outcomes, specially for chronic patients because now a patients complete "health picture" will be available (with their consent) to which ever healthcare provider they visit. We strongly believe that we can save millions of lives lost due to medical errors, lack of verifiable patient health data and help flatten the covid curve. (https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/europe/covid-19-pandemic-opens-new-frontiers-health-data-privacy) (https://www.medicaleconomics.com/news/why-new-us-interoperability-rules-matter-during-covid-19-pandemic)

Since we a new technology and are pre-deployment, we are currently serving 0 people. But we have secured pilot projects in Chicago (US), Niagara Falls (Canada) and Dubai (UAE).

In the first year will be serving over 5 million essential workers in North America. (10% of the total 55 million essential workers) (https://www.epi.org/blog/who-are-essential-workers-a-comprehensive-look-at-their-wages-demographics-and-unionization-rates/).

In the 5 years period, we expect to directly and meaningfully impact more than 50 million people across North America, Middle East and Africa.

In the first year, our goal is to generate as much traction as possible for by providing our solution to essential industries, specially healthcare. We want to create a positive impact by helping people return to work without the fear of being infected. To make this happen, we are securing strategic partnerships with hardware manufacturers to cheaply produce our IoT devices and provide these devices for free to organizations as part of the "covid package". The goal is to first partner with smaller community centers and hospitals and long term care centers because they are at most at risk of being infected. Think of this as getting our foot in the door and establishing closer relationships with these organizations.

Once we have helped these healthcare providers alleviate their immediate pain, we will then move to integrating our solution with their EHR systems to combine patient biometrics with their clinical records.

In the next five years, we will adapt and expand to other industries like humanitarian relief, e-government, banking and any other industries which need contactless identification and a secure network to exchange important data. We plan to achieve this by whitelabing our solution for larger enterprises and governments where we license our technology to be used independently. For example, we can provide our solution to UNHCR, WHO or MSF so they can identify refugees via iris scans upon arrival at any refugee settlement and get their medical records to provide them with the right treatment at the right time.

For the first year, our major barriers include fund raising to pilot our technology and procurement of sensors/integrated circuits to build our IoT devices.

In the next five years, we predict to run into legal and regulatory barriers as we scale to other countries and industries.

For fund raising, we are currently utilizing our considerable networks (in North America and UAE) to reach investors. We have adopted a referral model where we offer 5-10% "finder's fee" to people who connect us with investors and help us close deals. Our networks include US Department of State Business Incubation Program (GIST), Hofstra University NY Healthcare community, University of Colorado at Colorado Business Innovation, Global Entrepreneurship Network, IN5 (UAE) and Dubai Internet City.

Although we are building our IoT devices for the pilot project but in order to scale, we will outsource the hardware manufacturing to third party. We are already in-talks with Human Scale in Colorado (US) to make it happen.

For scaling to other industries and countries, we plan to have a reseller model where we establish partnership with local organizations and license our technology to them. The local organizations then deploy the solution in their countries as per the agreement with us.

Full time:
Syed Abrar Ahmed
Zain Moosa
Agha Hassan Khan

Part time:
Syed Rehan Uddin
Muhammad Taha Ahmed
Inam ul Haq

Subcontractor (for hardware):
Zaid Pirwani
Nasir Jumani

Total: 8 people

Syed Abrar Ahmed - CEO
Awarded Outstanding Entrepreneur from Emerging Economy @ GES 2019
Member International Alumni Exchange Network @ US Department of State
Claremont McKenna College (Kravis Lab) Fellow
Computer Science graduate and HyperLedger Blockchain expert.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/syedabrar5/

Zain Moosa - CBO
Serial entrepreneur and project management and startup growth expert with a consistent track record of successfully employing best business practices that improve efficiency, reduce operating costs whilst increasing productivity.     
Staffordshire University Graduate.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zmoosa

Muhammad Taha - CTO
Taha is a truly a tech wizard, proficient in designing and developing Web APIs and Servers using NodeJS with MongoDB, MySQL and Postgre SQL.
https://pk.linkedin.com/in/taha49

Syed Rehan Uddin - CIO
He 5+ years of experience developing in Enterprise applications development (Healthcare). He has a Microsoft Certification named Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 (Exam code 70-480).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/srehanuddin/

Inam ul Haq - Data Scientist
Inam is an IT veteran with over 12 years of development experience. Inam is a Certified HIPAA Security Officer and has made tremendous contributions (as a Team Lead) developing a centralized blood center management system called Panacea. He is also the Principal Instructor at PAF-KIET University for Machine Learning using Tensorflow since Aug 2016.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/inampaki/

We have a combined experience of more than 25 years in the digital health space. We previously built a blood center management and automation system which is deploy in more than 22 cities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and manages blood related data for more than 100,000 patients.

We have an amazing advisory board which helps us with business development, marketing, blockchain and healthcare.

The Niagara Falls Ryerson Innovation Hub, working with them to deploy pilot project with Niagara Health Foundation, raise capital and get Startup Visa in Canada to set a foot-hold in North America.

Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST), access to global mentors and resources like AWS credits and cash grants.

University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, working for patenting our technology.

Hofstra University NY Healthcare Community, access to potential clients and helping us conduct customer discovery interview and refining our business model.

IN5, awarded us with a office space in Dubai Internet City for 1 year (free of cost). They are also connecting us with private and public entities in UAE to deploy our solution.

IBM, we are part of IBM's HyperProtect Accelerator program with helps us with technical and business expertise.

Magnus Communications, helping us with sales and marketing strategies.

We provide a safe and contactless staff identification/attendance system combined with the fever detection and covid symptom analyses for pre-screening and prevention. 

Currently hospitals (specially community hospitals) are struggling with the influx of patients. They are required to perform temperature checks for all the visitors, including staff members. Due to this, they hired additional personnel who come into 100% contact with every patient, risking getting infected. These providers do not have contactless temperature checkers but are rather using in-ear thermometer which they have to clean after every use. All this adds up to a huge bottle neck for them which wastes time, material, resources and even ends up costing lives.

We provide them our solution by simply installing out Iris/temperature check IoT device at the entrance and near the cafeteria. 

We have a B2B SaaS revenue model where we provide the hardware devices for free and charge a tier based subscription fee. We believe this approach will increase adoption since organizations will not have to bear a hefty upfront investment to deploy our system.

Initially we will rely on grants and raising investment capital because we want to provide our solution to as many healthcare providers and essential industries as possible to support their daily operations and not lose staff members due to covid. We will still charge them a subscription fee (low-income client) that is very nominal as compared to the expenses they are incurring through the manual process.

In the long term, we will have a combination of low-income clients and fee-for-service models where we will continue to provide discounted service to smaller community hospitals and clinics but charge more to large enterprises and third party resellers.

This initiative is very important and personal to us. It is a tribute to my late brother who passed away from liver cancer and medical errors. A lot of mistakes were made during his treatments which led to his early demise. I don't want other patients and families to go through what we had to endure which is why I made it my mission to help people and create a positive impact.

To make this dream a reality, I need all the help I can get. I need access to funding to complete our pilots, partnerships and mentoring to further refine our business model, legal work, our impact and scale strategies. I realize that this is an immense undertaking and I will need the backing of networks like MIT to take this to the next level.

I want to create a global network of healthcare stakeholders and health ministries working together for patient safety. I do realize that bigger companies than us have tried it and I know it may even sound naive or comical. But I am not going to give up this and God knows I will do everything in my power to make this a reality.

We have the skills and the technology which has allowed to create a solution for meaningful impact. Now we need assistance in commercializing our solution and allow people to benefit from it.

To make that happen, we need to raise capital (either equity and/or grant) to execute and complete our pilot projects. This will prove to the world that the technology is creating a positive impact.

We will then refine our business model and distribution strategies by evaluating feedback from our pilots.

Another subject for which we will definitely need assistance is the legal. Although we are already registered as a Delaware C Corp, we still need help with the company structure, subsidiaries and also with patent filings.

I do not have specific names right now. I would love to partner with organizations which are working in the healthcare space and/or need an alternative to fingerprint identification for their operations.

We can also partner with organizations which need covid screening to provide peace of mind to their staff members.

I started working for patient safety and empowerment 4 years ago after my brother passed from liver cancer. It was during his treatments when we realized how difficult it is to send health information to/from hospital. A lot of mistakes were made which led to his demise. I asked myself, if we can send a tweet to millions of people around the world then why is it so difficult to send health data to patients and hospitals.

I initially built a patient portal which allowed people to combine medical records. We then realized people do not necessarily take interest in keeping their medical data. We realized that we needed to go to the source where the data is being generated.

We worked briefly with Australian government to integrate with their My Health Record system but realized their platform wasn't really patient-centered, it didn't allow patients to take their information outside of the portal.

We then shifted to creating a trustless system and arrived at the conclusion of a global digital identity network powered by blockchain and patient biometrics.

We have won multiple awards for our technology including the Outstanding Entrepreneur from Emerging Economies at GES 2019 in Netherlands. Completed US Department of State Business Incubation Program. And won a few other grant and pitch competitions.

We will use the funds to procure sensors and complete our IoT devices. And to execute and complete our pilot projects with a FQHC chain in Chicago (US), Niagara Falls (Canada) and Dubai (UAE).

We are already using AI for instant, safe and contactless IRIS authentication which we then use to fetch a patient's medical records.

We are also training our data models to predict lung tissue damage caused by covid. We achieve this analyzing a patient's iris scans, this method is called iris diagnoses aka iridology.

In the future, we will be able to track and monitor any outbreak or pandemic by combining our AI with Smartphone tracking to find out who came in contact with an infected person. Imagine that we combine a person's digital identity with their smartphone imei number. The person scans their iris and gets screened before entering a restaurant. At this time, they are clear and show no symptoms. The person then visits a mall after 6 hrs and gets screened again but this time they display a high fever. This means that something happened in the past 6hrs between the restaurant and the mall. We can then map out everyone who came in contact with this person by leveraging geospatial technology through their smartphone.

Our solution is also applicable for maintaining medical records for women, specially for maternal health.

Healthcare service management for refugees are becoming dire with each passing day. Over 68.5 million refugees are currently living in camps all around the world while every minute 31 new people are forced to leave their homes.

Due to limited resources, these people are constantly moved from one place to another which leads to information disarray specially when it comes to managing their health records. This not only impedes providing effective care to the people but also ends up causing avoidable suffering and deaths. For decades, organizations and healthcare providers have been looking for solutions which can securely give these people control over their health data, make health data transfer easy and transparent among practitioners and even help patients finance their treatments.

To solve this growing problem, we developed the first global patient-centered identification and health data exchange powered by permissioned blockchain and biometrics.

Refugees have no IDs or paperwork. Imagine being able to bind their medical records and tests to their iris scans so the next time they arrive at any refugee camp. The administration can simply scan their iris, identify them and know exactly what illnesses they have. The doctors can immediately see if the refugee has covid, ebola or any other disease and provide them with the proper treatment right out of the gate while also keeping the rest of the population safe.

Our technology can also be used to allow refugees to access their medical records at the country of their resettlement to ensure continuity of care.

We will use this prize to pilot our solution with UNHCR, WHO and MSF.

Our solution aligns perfectly with the UN SDG Number 3, Good Health and Well-being.

Our vision is to create a consortium of all the health ministries and healthcare stakeholders of the world. and since we leverage distributed ledger technology, there is no central authority, there is no single point of failure and no single entity owns the data. Instead everyone works together for patient safety and empowerment.

Having access to patient health records will not only allow doctors to treat patients effectively and save lives, it will also allow patients to become self
conscious about their overall health. It will provide doctors and researchers with unprecedented insight about both individual patient health and mass population health trends. And can even help prevent and combat future outbreaks and pandemics.

We will use the prize to finalize our technology and deploy it for our pilot projects in communities.

Our solution has the potential to save millions of lives that are (and will be) affected by the pandemic. We intend this solution to be the de-facto alternative to fingerprint attendance systems and the "first line of warning" against COVID, specially for hospitals.

As we move forward to the post-pandemic stage, we will need checkpoints in place for potential COVID exposure, this is where we come in. We will allow hospital staff and other organizations, the peace of mind that their workers have a safe working environment (safe zone) free from the contagion.

In the short term, our solution will contribute tremendously towards COVID prevention by reducing physical contact. In the medium term, it will be able to pre-screen people with COVID symptoms so they can get immediate and proper treatment. In the long term, the technology will help to "flatten the curve" and help us better navigate this crisis. All the data, including the COVID probability, fever readings and other relevant information will be anonymously saved separately which will be made available to humanitarian organizations like WHO and CDC. This will help us monitor and measure the virus spread and the impact 

Our technology further promotes good health and well-being by allowing doctors to instantly and securely identifying patients, specially in emergencies. Identifying Patients is the Number 1 Priority for the both the Joint Commission International and WHO's Patient Safety Goals and contributes to 134 million adverse events and 2.6 million deaths each year around the world.

We will use the funds to procure sensors and complete our IoT devices. And to execute and complete our pilot projects with a FQHC chain in Chicago (US), Niagara Falls (Canada) and Dubai (UAE).