ALL2Business support action provides various services targeted to different phases of AAL projects’ life-cycle. We met JAME project to learn about their future business and their experience as beneficiary of ALL2Business support.
The JAME project has the ambition to create an innovative wearable device that combines biomedical technologies and design to control disabling symptoms in ageing people with chronic neurodegenerative diseases and improve their quality of life.
The goal of the project is to mitigate the main effect of degenerative diseases: tremor.
The JAME project team is heterogeneous, a consortium coordinated by the University of Trieste-Italy which involves Feature Jam, an Italian SME, 3 research institutes in Europe (in Romania, Spain e Italy) and BOONE a Belgian end user’s organization.
What are your mission and goals?
Our mission is to design and develop medical devices combining medical technologies, design and clinical efficacy. With our wearable device we want to help people who are suffering from symptoms, like tremors, the absence of an effective and non-invasive treatments/therapies
Tremor is a visible symptom: non-invasive treatments are missing and existing commercial devices are highly stigmatizing for patients. Our device aims at keeping patients with chronic conditions and disabling symptoms as much active as possible, both in their social and working life.
Can you describe in a few words how your device works?
Combining advanced technologies with design principles we will develop a wearable device, which can monitor the movement of the upper limbs and can recognize tremor and suppress it. through an ad hoc algorithm based on machine learning, can recognize tremor and reduce it.
What is your commercialization & market strategy?
Being in an early stage of development, we are still reflecting on a possible plan: we want to identify the best strategy between a direct approach to the consumer or a partnership with other SMEs focused on similar devices such as movement disorders (B2B market). If we will opt for the second approach we are thinking about setting up an enterprise network (B2B2C market).
What is your plan to reach your customers and to enter the market?
Our customers are mainly patients with Parkinson’s disease and “essential tremor” (which is a neurological disorder) and their caregivers. Our early adopters will be identified through neurological patients that are involved in our project relevant neurologists and organizations for patients. We will build a social media strategy and we will organize conferences and events to promote our device.
What did you learn from AAL2Business experience? What is the added value of the Lean Start-up Academy (LSA)?
During the three LSA workshops we gained knowledge about interesting tools, such as the Lean Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas and the Javelin Board that allowed us starting to think in directions we did not consider before. We also took advantage of the private online sessions in which we discussed with an expert about our project, receiving important and constructive criticism and suggestions.
AAL2Business helped us in understanding better our capabilities in terms of market and to identify our customers. We have also benefited from the “Market guidance” service, which helped us to clarify our intellectual property (IP) strategy.
And now?
Our next step is to share the work done until now thanks to AAL2Business with all partners in our consortium, We believe that AAL2Business has been very a really relevant experience and helped us to draft our future journey.
