JAKARTA - Spotify founder Daniel Ek is starting to enter the healthcare industry. A post shared on LinkedIn calls Ek co-founder of a startup, named Neko Health, which specializes in providing body scans supported by artificial intelligence (AI). This was first reported by European news outlets Sifter and Tech.eu.
"After four years of intensive research and product development, we officially launched Neko Health today," wrote the post. This company was founded by Hjalmar Nilsone and Daniel Ek with the vision of creating a health care system that can help people stay healthy through preventive and early detection measures.
According to a translation version of the Neko Health website, the Swedish company's non-invasive body-wide scanner can detect and measure the growth of birth certificates, rashes, and aging spots. It also uses separate scanners to detect abnormalities in the function of the heart, blood pressure, and pulses throughout the body.
Neko said the company's 360-degree body scanner is equipped with more than 70 sensors that collect more than "50 million data points on the skin, heart, blood vessels, breathing, microcirculation, and others."
This data is then analyzed by an "self-study AI-powered system" that describes results for doctors and patients. The client gets results on their meeting promise, and can even see and track their results on the apps that accompany them.
Our mission is to build a proactive health care system, which focuses on disease prevention, Nilsone wrote in a post on LinkedIn, citing rising health care costs in Sweden and the European Union.
The scanning of the whole body, which Neko said took only a few minutes, is currently open to the public in Sweden at a cost of 2,000 SEZ (or around Rp. 2.8 million). At the time of writing, the scan is currently sold out.
The drop of Ek into the healthcare industry is not surprising. Rumors about the startup have been circulating since November, and Ek has long hinted at getting involved in health care.
In 2013, a report from The Financial Times revealed that "Ek spent his free time thinking of ways to fix a 'chaotic' health care system. I'm not the inventor, but I might be stupid enough to fight the system and try to beat him in his own way," he said at the time.
It's definitely too early to know what impact Neko Health can have on the healthcare industry, but it sounds promising. Similar technologies have emerged in the past, when Facebook and New York University worked together to make MRI scans faster using AI, and researchers developed an AI technology that scans your retina and predicts the risk of your heart disease.
However, Neko Health uses this technology on a larger and more accessible scale, and is interesting to think about its potential.
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