i-Deal and Akern join forces on CONCERTO project to support the development of AI-based technologies for clinical screening

March 2022 - Covid-19 pandemic has catalized a worldwide digital transformation across all fields including healthcare. In this direction CONCERTO aims to develop an AI-based solution for clinical screening to improve the management of chronic diseased populations, with the specific objective of identifying, in an early phase, specific parameter alterations as clinical prognostic indicators.

Technology within this digital transformation is key to healthcare progress, nevertheless, patient data collection (personal, clinical, biometric and anthropometric data) remains a limiting hurdle and therefore AI enpowered analytics in healthcare practice has become a global requirement, more than a desired state. CONCERTO will leverage cutting-edge AI technologies, such as remote body image analysis and body composition assessment, to manage big data in a regulated, safe, and anonymized open-data database. This database will be digitally accessible, through a dedicated layer of APIs, to interested third-parties. Moreover, CONCERTO will provide GATEKEEPER platform with an innovative clinical service, aimed to optimize the management of clinical screening for physicians and end users (self-monitoring), using consumer electronic devices, web interfaces and a mobile App. The new data-driven technology will combine body image analysis with body composition assessments, allowing the identification of early clinical prognostic indicators to support diagonosis of several chronic diseases, starting from the most common, obesity and overweight, to different kinds of linked complications (diabetes, heart diseases and hypertension).

The GATEKEEPER ecosystem

The project kicked off in January - with a previsional duration of 12 months - within the GATEKEPEER ecosystem, as a European Multi Centric Large-Scale Pilot on Smart Living Environments. GATEKEEPER receives funds, among others, to implement projects aimed at screening data-based populations for specific diseases or clinical conditions (acute complications, comorbidities, etc.), in order to support the shift towards a “preventive” healthcare rather than of “curative” healthcare approach. This process, that must involve both physicians and patients, can come true only through the use of consumer technologies already available to them, such as smartphones.

SIZEYOU© and BODYGRAM®

CONCERTO will implement a web data-based service starting from 2 clinically validated technologies with a well-established presence on the market: SizeYou© solution (algorithms for the self-collection of body measurements and anthropometric data by mobile phone) and Bodygram® Software (dedicated platform for the interpretation and reporting of body composition data collected though bioimpedance analyzers). The synergic collaboration of these two different technologies will result in a clinical tool for early diagnosis of specific healthcare conditions related to body composition alteration, like localized adiposity or appendicular lean tissue losses.

SizeYou© solution developed by i-Deal on an AI based artificial vision and supervised machine learning techniques, can collect the measurements of human body remotely (SizeYou ), by taking just two fully anonymous pictures of the user (one rear and one lateral shot) by a common camera or a smartphone. The technology relies on a mobile App (Android and iOS), and the user’s photographs never leave the smartphone (also, the user’s face is never captured). The silhouette identification is managed locally, by the mobile device, and only a set of specific coordinates is sent to the server for body measurement elaborations. The measurements collected reproduce the 3D shape of the body (including: height, weight, neck girth, chest girth, waist girth, hip girth, shoulder width, upper arm girth - biceps, arm length - shoulder to wrist, crotch length, crotch height).

Bodygram® by Akern, is a medical software, continuously upgraded to state of art, for the assessment of body composition parameters measured with a bioimpedance analyzer. Bodygram® Software relies on a huge database and multiple clinical validations, and has become over time the reference brand software to analyze and report body composition alteration in several different clinical conditions (Bodygram by Akern ). The advantage of unifying SizeYou© and Bodygram® technologies is to integrate a 2D digital imaging anthropometry within the bioimpedance analysis, which will allow clinicians to identify body composition phenotype alteration. The collaboration between I-Deal and Akern, will allow CONCERTO to be an innovative and feasible solution in the healthcare process: from screening to diagnosis, by means of monitoring and self-monitoring, from assessment planning and treatment optimization, up to personalized follow up protocols. GATEKEEPER/CONCERTO by i-Deal and Akern is the winning project in challenge 4 (clinical screening management) of the Open Call 2 released by GATEKEEPER (https://www.gatekeeper-project.eu/open-call ) a European Multi Centric Large-Scale Pilot on Smart Living Environments, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under GA n° 857223.