Empeal
Nominated Award: Best Application of AI to achieve Social Good
Website of Company: https://empeal.com
Empeal is an AI driven multi-sided digital health platform. The Empeal App helps users improve their physical and mental health through data driven, coach led programmes encompassing nutrition, movement, sleep, and stress management, along with behavioural support for prevention and management of chronic health conditions.
Empeal gathers static and dynamic data from users through customisable interactive assessments and questionnaires, multiple wearable integrations, nutrition, and other third-party solution integrations. The user profiles are run through a proprietary Predictive AI Recommender Engine (PARE) to deliver 1/1 or group health and wellbeing solutions in a gamified way along with coach and clinician access. It is also easy to set up group activity challenges and support groups. The decision support tools feeds back analytics with customisable dashboards to users, coaches, and other stakeholders with their respective level of data privacy for effective decision making. Empeal learns from user’s data dynamically for better suggestions and timely interventions by health care professionals (HCPs).
Formed in 2017, Empeal started its operation in Spring of 2018. It is founded by Sohini De (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sohinide) after 22 successful years in Investments, managing large Global funds specialising in health, food, pharma, and environmental sectors and sustainable equities. Sohini is also a qualified nutritional therapist based on functional medicine. Co-Founder Aurobinda De (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aurobindade) has more than 26 years of experience in managing complex IT projects in large multinationals and commercialising innovative IT solutions.
Today Empeal has an in-house team of nineteen people, creating a strong and diversified technical development, data science, analytics, and market research team. Our advisors interact weekly, and our tech team works closely with dedicated resources from tech partners like IBM, Microsoft etc.
Empeal is a multi-award winning company. It is an Enterprise-Ireland High-Potential-Start-Up, along with being awarded Fingal Best Start-Up, and Business Post 100 Hot Start-Up in the past. Empeal has also appeared in a number of publications like Silicon-Republic and Irish-Times several times. Recently Empeal has won the Trinity Tangent Alsessor Accelerator and European Big-Booster awards which is paving way for international expansion.
Empeal is headquartered in Dublin with offices in Cork, the UK and India. It has raised €1 Million so far from Enterprise-Ireland, NDRC and private investors. It is a commercially available product and has thousands of live users on the platform. It boasts of having names like RCSI, CPL, TUD on its list of clients. Empeal is revenue generating and in 2022, expecting 50% of its entire revenue to be from exports.
At this point, Empeal operates in Ireland and India with expansion plans for UK, Europe Middle East and USA. Empeal is in active advanced discussion with companies in Grenoble, Barcelona and Dubai to start new projects. Empeal has an ambitious growth and expansion plan, with its new version of APP coming in Autumn 2022. Empeal is projecting to have a million users on the platform by end of 2024.
Reason for Nomination
Lifestyle related diseases are now the leading cause of death worldwide. There has been a shift in mortality and morbidity from infectious disease, and malnutrition to non-communicable disease (NCD). There is now overwhelming evidence that lifestyle factors such as poor diet, physical inactivity, tobacco use, excessive drug (including alcohol) consumption, and psychosocial factors (chronic stress and lack of social support and community) are key proximal factors in the pathogenesis and incidence of NCDs.
In 2015, global leaders set Sustainable Development Goal 3.4 as a target for countries to reduce their risk of premature mortality from NCDs by a third relative to 2015 levels by 2030. Accumulated research over the past 50 years has highlighted the importance of healthy lifestyle behaviour in the prevention and treatment of disease processes. Research from the World Health Organisation (WHO, among other groups, has highlighted the importance of lifestyle factors and practices in the prevention of chronic disease, including cardiovascular disease (CVD), dementia, and Type 2 Diabetes among others. Although changes to lifestyle practices can have significant impacts on disease prevention and control, adherence to these practices has proved difficult for the individuals concerned. Experts in the field acknowledge that behavioural change science is important in developing new sustainable habits that are required to maintain changes in lifestyle. Health coaches can help participants develop sustainable healthy lifestyle habits.
This is where Empeal disrupts. There are point solutions available on both wellbeing and clinical sides. However, there is no solution available which can be easily customised to gather data and support multitherapeutic areas connecting clinical and lifestyle management. With adherence as the key to success, Empeal’s integrated therapeutic and lifestyle management approach is geared to deliver right personalised results at scale. This is the missing link as clinicians have no view of this important area of care. Empeal provides the remote monitoring, decision support system, recommendation delivery and adherence support for nutrition, lifestyle, and behavioural factors.
Empeal can help to deliver remote assessments, deliver the right patient education, monitor patient nutrition, lifestyle and behavioural aspects, and report back to patients as well as clinical teams with full data privacy while developing a customised decision support system. For Example: In NCPO’s Oct 2021 event ‘Let’s Talk Obesity’, it was suggested that one of the major issues between the patient and the clinician is that the clinician does not have clear view of the patient behaviour in terms of nutrition and lifestyle between consultations. This gives rise to frustration between both the parties. Also, the same event stressed on the importance of the clinician’s ability to be an effective coach. Empeal is currently working on RCSI project called ‘Coach Connect’, where Empeal platform was chosen mainly for its coaching aspects. Empeal’s AI helps the app become the 24/7 Health coach for users giving the coaching solution scale, enabling 25x more efficiency.
Blended support, encompassing digital delivery of recommendations, 1-2-1 chat/audio/video as well as face-to-face interactions, shifted the focus from a directive disease management approach to a more collaborative and self-directed process, resulting in significant improvements in patients’ quality of life. This approach improves the long-term healthcare needs of individuals with chronic disease, and subsequently reduces the fiscal and physical burden on primary care services. However, we need to deliver these solutions at scale and that is where Empeal solution comes in with the help of AI, building that scale that can be easily replicated globally.
On the corporate wellbeing side, many businesses have started implementing health programs for their employees at the workplace which, helps companies in augmenting productivity while reducing the overall operational costs. However, despite this significant investment, many health and wellbeing initiatives are having little or no impact because of the lack of data driven initiatives. Another reason is related to selection bias, whereby those with serious health issues tend not to enrol in corporate wellbeing programmes.
The bottom line remains that despite significant investment, corporate wellbeing programmes (based on current data) seem to be largely ineffective in terms of improving overall occupational health. The problem is further exacerbated by the COVID 19 type pandemic scenario and the following move to hybrid or remote working. Empeal helps organisations seamlessly roll out employee wellbeing initiatives globally giving the employees personalised choices to improve their health in a secured data environment while saving HR time.
As a result, Empeal solution is in the right place at the right time.
Additional Information:
Empeal is working with the HSE and Healthy Ireland to achieve their objectives with relevant patient education, remote patient monitoring and decision support systems of nutrition and lifestyle factors to help clinical teams provide effective health outcomes for their patients. Adding to that, early warning signalling to keep patients out of hospitals longer, improving their quality of life, and predictive modelling to ensure prevention. Even a 1% reduction of the same, will save €3.5mn for a population of 5mn on just one chronic disease, like obesity.
To meet the HSE digital transformation paradigm of ‘Stay left, shift left’, Empeal can help in both prevention and management of chronic health conditions like obesity, diabetes, etc., which needs nutrition, lifestyle and behaviour change for effective health outcomes. Empeal is working on projects across range of health conditions like Mental health (Anxiety, Burnout), Diabetes, Obesity, fertility, which needs nutrition and lifestyle management.
It also fits well with Healthy Ireland’s objective of ‘increasing the proportion of people who are healthy at all stages of life’ by eating well, staying active, minding mood, switching off, keeping in contact, and local resource availability. Working with clinical teams, Empeal is helping in appropriate patient education, remote monitoring of nutrition, movement, sleep, and stress while giving them coach and support group access via digital platform in a gamified way. Most importantly, the decision support system and analytics gives vital information to coaches/clinicians and other stakeholders for timely interventions and scale.
Delivering a seamless, comfortable, and enjoyable user-experience, Empeal is an AI driven 24/7 Health Coach that motivates consistent, positive changes for big health impacts through a gamified platform. We are honoured to collaborate, innovate, and test this solution with HSE/Healthy Ireland cohorts for significant benefits for both HSE and Empeal. We are also working in India, UAE and Spain to deliver lifestyle management for prevention and management of chronic health conditions.
Empeal is working with RCSI in Horizon-Europe project where Empeal-APP is being suggested as the core platform to be used for social health and wellbeing management. Empeal will be used in 5 towns in 5 different countries in Europe, including Ireland.