AALIA.tech

44million people in theU.S. are foreign born : 13,5%of the U.S.population

100% of caregivers will be confronted to patients who don't speak their language.

AALIA.tech is an easy-to-use smartphone application dedicated to health professionals, that can be used by typing or vocal instructions. Our innovation is about digitizing medical interpretation, bringing together in a single device, all the medical knowledge in several languages and dialects. We are using Artificial Intelligence to overcome communication issues between patients and caregivers speaking different languages. 

AALIA.tech adapts to the patient’s linguistic culture and hence offers a personalized solution. For instance, it can differentiate the Arabic spoken in Egypt from the one spoken in Lebanon, and therefore provide a high quality translation consistent with the patient’s background.

By using our product, healthcare professionals can better take care of their foreigner patients, save time, increase their efficiency and most importantly, avoid misunderstandings leading to medical errors.

8,2 million people in France are foreign born : 12,3 % of the french population.

Some 13.5 percent of the U.S. population (44 million) is foreign born and many are not proficient in English, choosing to speak Spanish at home instead. A report from the Migration Policy Institute found that 22 percent of the U.S. population does not speak English at home.

Communication issues impact severely on the quality of healthcare. The misleading information provided by the patient or the praticien can lead to dramatic diagnosis and consequences. According to a Canadian study (Source: Lee & al, 5, 86-89, Academic Emergency Medicine), a patient who does not speak the language of the caregiver is 70% more likely to be wrongly or unnecessarily admitted to the hospital. The existing solutions to overcome this issue rely on the caregiver’s language skills or the use of an interpreter. However, none of these options is always available. Moreover, appealing to a medical interpreter is expensive, so this solution relies on the hospital’s financial budget.  In contrast, our service offers a rapid, personalized and low-cost solution to overcome the communication issues during medical visits.

We propose an AI-based voice assistant medical interpreter that translates medical questions into the patient’s native language, taking into account the medical context and the patient's culture. 

The app can assist doctors during medical visits with patients who speak a different language.  

We offer a service that is constantly updated, improving with the collected data thereby improving the recognition to be able to recognize new expressions. The more the service is used, the smarter it becomes and the more adjusted it is to the patient linguistic culture. The learning process is based on 48 sentences gained from medical interviews and offered in several languages. Feedbacks from healthcare professionals, which cooperate with us, increased our database and today we can offer more than 600 translated sentences in 60 languages and dialects being enriched.

Our solution uses SpeechToText, Language Understanding and TextToSpeech as well as a translation service system oriented to the medical context

We aim to help 2 types of populations : Healthcare professionals and foreign patients.

Healthcare professionals can better take care of their foreigner patients, save time, increase their efficiency and most importantly, avoid misunderstandings leading to medical errors.

We designed the solution with Healthcare professionals to ensure we respond to their needs.

Foreign patients will be directly impacted because they won’t have to worry if the caregiver will understand them during a medical visit. They are tourists from all over the world, but we target migrants and refugees to help them overcome the barrier language.

We are testing our solution with patients from the French Red Cross to ensure our solution has a positive impact on the most vulnerable too.

Our solution aims to solve barrier language problems in the medical context. Since the beginning of the pandemic, it is really difficult for foreign patients with covid19 to see a doctor without an interpreter. This is a real problem of public health because a patient who doesn’t understand the seriousness of the situation won’t be careful enough to help limit the spreading of the disease. This is why our solution AALIA.tech is very important in times of pandemic crisis.

Our innovation is about digitizing medical interpretation, bringing together in a single device, all the medical knowledge in several languages and dialects. We are using Artificial Intelligence to overcome communication issues between patients and caregivers speaking different languages. 

AALIA.tech adapts to the patient’s linguistic culture and hence offers a personalized solution. For instance, it can differentiate the Arabic spoken in Egypt from the one spoken in Lebanon, and therefore provide a high quality translation consistent with the patient’s background.

AALIA.tech is an easy-to-use smartphone application dedicated to health professionals, that can be used by typing or vocal instructions. 

The solution we offer is a medical voice assistant that instantly translates the doctor's questions into the patient's native language, taking into account the medical context as well as the patient's culture. This is not a word to word translation it is real language comprehension and reformulation to make sure the caregiver knows what is being translated to their patients.

What we offer is a service that is constantly improving thanks to the data collected. Indeed, the more the service is used, the smarter it will be and will be able to recognize new expressions. 

We have currently more than 600 medical sentences translated in several languages and rare dialects.

I expect our solution to have an impact on healthcare inequality by providing better quality of care for everybody and saving lives. We are in the process of making a measure of impact with the French Red Cross.

The solution is about to be launched widely, at the moment we have around 30 healthcare professionnels.

In one year we aim to have 50 000 users.

In five years, at least 5 million of people that our solution will directly and meaningfully affect.

Our strategy is to target the French market the first year as a test before the US market. 

We have already built a strong connection with seniors and medical interns working in hospitals, mainly in Paris. Medical interns are our most valuable ambassadors given their comfort with technology. We aim to become a channel friendly company & consider channel partners as the future of our growth.

Our application is already on beta test on the AppleStore. Is it already scalable.

As a data scientist with a developer background, I am coding the app myself from scratch so no technical problem.

For the moment there is only financial barrier 

We promote the app widely without budget by focusing on our own network to make the app known by healthcare professionals.

13 people : 

10 full time, 1 contractor, 2 part time

Samah Ghalloussi, CEO/CTO & co-founder

She has a background in Health Information Technology. She worked 3 years at the CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission) as a research engineer in the NLP research laboratory. After that, she joined a parisian startup to add AI in a new messaging app. Then she was selected to become a Public Interest Entrepreneur (the french version of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship launched by Obama in 2012). She worked at the French Ministry of Health as a data scientist before co-founding AALIA.tech. She started working on AALIA.tech in february 2019 and was able to create the full MVP from scratch : medical chatbot multi-platform and smartphone app on flutter. Her adage is learning by doing. She loves to solve problems by thinking outside of the box. Her network and ability to communicate with both technical people and medical people will help her make this project a success.

Dorsaf Ghalloussi, COO & co-founder, strategic partnership manager. 

She is a medical expert in hematology and blood disorders diseases graduate with honors from Aix Marseille Medical School in France. She is an independent and productive interdisciplinary researcher with experience designing and managing projects across platelet hematology and hereditary bleeding disorder. Her capacity to put her scientific and medical knowledge to improve the application and her ability to connect with relevant medical staff makes her the best person to develop the startup. 

French Red Cross : Incubation

La Ruche : Incubation's program TechForGood

Our revenue model is SaaS-based and we charge healthcare professionals on a monthly basis.

We offer 3 memberships options: freemium for occasional users, premium pro (165$/month), platinum (on quote). The first option (freemium) is limited to 3 medical visits requesting medical interpretation (up to 1 hour per medical visit), the second option (premium) is limited to 50 full medical visits requesting medical interpretation and the third option (platinium) is for private and public institutions wanting to provide the tool for all of their staff. 

Also, we aim to provide telemedicine tools as white labelling.

MIT hacking Medicine Team

I won a challenge they held in France in June 2018

We will be able to provide more and more languages into the solution with high quality level. This is difficult for rare languages to provide a decent solution especially with voice synthesis. We ami to be able to provide voice synthesis of Wolof and other rare language that are often forgotten in new technologies

We are taking into consideration cultural differences in our medical translations, to be sure the patient understand the medical questions

I am a member of Women in IA, I developed the technical solution by myself and I promote gender equality in tech by giving public speeches to help women overcome the gender gap in tech 

Refugee resilience and self-reliance can be challenging when they arrive in a new country and don't speak the language. Our solution help refugees overcome the language barrier in healthcare.