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Twelve ambitious AI startups have been selected to compete in the AI Pitch Competition. The finals are on November 7, 2024, and Innovation Origins will portray each contestant in the run-up to that event. The AI Pitch Competition is a Brabant-based organization that aims to spotlight the most innovative AI solutions, offering startups the opportunity to present their ideas, connect with industry leaders, and accelerate their growth. Today, we show what MoreMovement has in store for the world. Marco van der Aa, co-founder, answers our questions.
MoreMovement aims to simplify the analysis of body movements and positions. Its innovative analysis is widely applicable to professional and amateur sports, as well as physical and occupational therapy. Reinforce your knowledge with AI motion analysis in your familiar environment: on the field or in the treatment room.
1. Technical innovation: What specific AI technology or algorithm is at the core of your solution, and how does it differentiate from existing approaches in the industry?
"The core of our innovation lies in bringing complex AI technology to end users in a pragmatic and easy-to-use manner. Our technology is leveraging advanced deep learning models for 2D and 3D human pose estimation based on vision transformers combined with our proprietary analysis language. This technology not only allows for accurate prediction and correction of joint coordinates, captured in real-time from edge devices like mobile phones, but also ensures robustness against variations in pose, clothing, and lighting. What sets us apart is that movement experts—such as physiotherapists, rehabilitation, geriatric, and occupational therapists, as well as elite and recreational sports coaches—can easily define automated movement analyses themselves without any technical knowledge, all through our single, unified platform. We bring AI to the field, where its power is revealed."
2. Scalability and practical application: How scalable is your AI solution, and what are the primary challenges you anticipate in bringing it to a global or large-scale market?
"First, our 'one platform, one solution' approach maximizes versatility, allowing it to be adapted to various use cases, ranging from paramedics to elite and recreational sports coaches. In other words, our technology can be utilized wherever motion analysis is valuable, empowering experts to see fine details of a client’s movement without using sensors or suits, offline and in real-time while making the subjective objective.
Secondly, local and global expansion is technically a nonissue due to our cloud-based infrastructure."
3. Ethical considerations: How does your startup address potential ethical concerns related to bias, fairness, or transparency in AI decision-making? Can you provide an example of how you mitigate such risks?
"Our human pose estimation models are trained on diverse datasets, such as Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP, and MSCOCO3. These datasets encompass a wide range of human poses and activities, which helps minimize bias and improve the model’s robustness across different demographics.
The video made by our users will not be shared for training purposes. The data generated from the video by our AI engines are stored anonymously and analysis data will not be stored at all. This approach significantly reduces privacy risks and ensures compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR."
4. Societal impact: In what ways do you believe your AI solution can positively impact society? Are there any unintended societal risks or challenges you foresee, and do you prepare to handle them?
"Every four minutes, a person aged 65 or older ends up in the emergency room due to a fall. The consequences of such falls are significant, both in terms of personal suffering and Dutch societal healthcare costs, which currently exceed €1 billion and are projected to surpass €4 billion by 2050. Our solution significantly contributes to the timely detection of fall risks and accelerates rehabilitation processes. Viewed through a broader lens, our innovative AI solution will lead to faster and more accurate diagnoses, improved patient outcomes, and reduced healthcare costs. This is particularly crucial given the current strain on the Dutch healthcare system."
5. Entrepreneurial journey: What has been the biggest hurdle in launching your AI startup, and how did you overcome it? How has the current AI landscape shaped your business model and growth strategy?
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"The biggest hurdle in launching our AI startup has been validating our solution with potential customers. We overcame this by conducting extensive interviews, presentations, and rapid pilots, which facilitated fast learn-fail-learn cycles. With its rapid advancements and increasing acceptance, the current AI landscape has shaped our business model to focus on a single platform that provides one solution for multiple segments. This approach allows us to scale efficiently and adapt to various market needs."
6. Regulation and compliance: How do you prepare for the increasing regulatory frameworks around AI, such as GDPR, AI Act, or other data privacy laws? How does this impact your innovation and development process?
"We are proactively preparing for regulatory frameworks like GDPR and the AI Act by implementing robust data privacy measures from the outset. We ensure that our output is safe and anonymous, which impacts our innovation and development process by requiring us to prioritize compliance and ethical considerations from the beginning. This approach ensures that our solution is not only effective but also responsible and trustworthy."
"As it stands, no other solution unlocks AI for experts in such a simple and pragmatic way. Our long-term vision is to become a leading provider of AI video analysis software for movement optimization, injury prevention, and early detection of conditions. Over the next 5 to 10 years, we envision our technology evolving to incorporate more advanced AI models and expanding into new markets globally. We aim to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of AI in healthcare by continuously innovating and adapting to emerging needs."
"We believe we will win this contest because the societal impact of our solution is immense, already considering the focus on our initial segment and even more when extending to many other segments. Technologically, our solution uniquely unlocks complex AI to non-technical users. It addresses real-world problems faced by physiotherapists and rehabilitation experts, providing tangible benefits that improve patient care and outcomes. Additionally, our solution significantly reduces the strain on our healthcare system, making it a game-changer in the industry. So much looking forward to the pitch!"