Okimo

No child should fall behind because of preventable reasons

It is estimated that 19-20% of all students have visual and developmental problems that affect their abbility to learn. However, only 2 of 3 american children have their vision tested before and during school. In developing countries almost no child is tested before entering first grade.

Even if a child is lucky enough to have a preventative screening at school, his chances of getting treatment are at jeopardy, especially in urban areas of low income countries. According to the WHO, there is a shortage of 65,000 optometrists and ophtalmologists worldwide to diagnose and treat all Vision Problems. Training them will cost 28 billion dollars.

At Okimo, we use technology to cover this lack of specialists that are needed to screen and treat every patient in the world. How? we do massive preventative screeenings at schools with just a laptop and a sensor. 

At a third of the cost and time, we can early detect children that show red flags and that would need a referral to a specialist to confirm a diagnosis and offer treatment.

We are building machine learning algorithms that can learn how to support diagnosis decisions and treatment plans in order to offer telemedicne solutions for problems detected.

We are currently piloting the solution in public schools of Paraguay.

It is estimated that around 20% of students have a visual problem, but they remain undiagnosed due to the lack of preventative screenings. Ophthalmologists are scarce and expensive: the WHO estimates there is a lack of 65,000 specialists in the world to detect and treat conditions, which represents a cost of 28 billion dollars.

We are using eye tracking and machine learning to bring mass screenings to schools at a fraction of the cost. Our propietary software analyzes eye tracking data and detects children who may have a problem and need a referral (patent pending).

Bringing specialists to schools to screen every single child would be too expensive and time consuming, which is why there are almost no preventative screenings in most countries.

In order to solve this, we have developed software to perform mass screenings using eye tracking technology to track eye movements while reading and performing other tasks. 

Our software analyzes data provided by the eye tracker to estimate metrics and compare them to norms based on age, language, region and other factors, in order to identify those with low performance and refer them to a specialist.

In the next 12 months we aim to conduct a major pilot with 1500 children in order to publish a first academic paper for normative data of paraguayan students reading performance and metrics. This paper can be replicated in other countries in the region and we believe that will help us commercialize the software to governments and organizations in Latin America that are looking for improving the quality of education and health access for early childhood.

We want to start by piloting a mass visual screening software tool in Paraguay as we have more connections with organizations and government here. 

In the next 3 to 5 years we want to screen the whole population of paraguayan students in primary school.

Paraguay would be a first step, and as the rest of the region has similar conditions, we are very confident that we can scale the solution with the same strategy, an academic paper for stablishing normative data, lobby and commercialization of the data collection software.

We are currently deploying our technology through partnerships with NGOs and the local goverment.

We go to public schools to screen every single student in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade in order to early detect visual and developmental problems they might have. Children who fail the screening are referred to specialists that we bring to the schools.

In a second phase of the project, we aim to develop new and more specialized tests that will help automate the confirmation of a screening result: the formal diagnosis.

We screened around 500 children so far and expect to get to 1,000 by the end of the year.

At the moment we are fundraising to do a 1,500 children pilot in order to publish an academic paper that aims to understand how paraguayan children read, what is the baseline for reading metrics and what associated factors may influence their performance.

We are also negotiating a partnership with the current Ministry of Education in order to do more pilots together.

As mentioned before, we expect to affect 1000 children by the end of 2018 and another aditional 1,500 children once we finish fundraising for a major research paper that aims to stablish baselines for reading metrics in paraguayan students and factors associated with their performance.

We are a multi disciplinary team with a special set of complimentary skills. Bhavin Shah is a behavioural optometrist who has more than 15 years of experience in screening and treating visual conditions. Nahum Dam has 15 years of experience developing software and a 2 successful startups Oddee.com (sold) and Factslides.com. I am a visually impaired lawyer and entrepreneur who understands the problem first hand and can fundraise and sell. We have scientists with proved experience as academic advisors and researchers.

Our revenue model is based on a Software as a Service Model. We charge between 2 and 5 US$ per student screened. Our customers are governments, organizations and parents of school aged children.

We are looking for academic partnerships and connections in order to run more pilot studies and research that can help us penetrate new markets and gain credibility. Solve could help us connect with the MIT community in order to look for researchers that might be interested in collaborating with us and to validate the technology we are building, not only from a technological point of view but as a social impact creator.

In order to succeed we need to be able to show credibility. Solve could help us build that credibility as a solid technological solution and proven social impact tool. As we are not a university spin off startup, we always had a problem to validate the solution scientifically. It has been specially hard to engage research labs being a startup outside a university.

We believe Solve can help us with that missing component to build our credibility in order to be able to commercialize the solution.