A remote and price efficient tool for jaundice screening

ended

Worldwide, 135 million children are born each year and neonatal jaundice, a common condition caused by elevated levels of bilirubin, affects approximately 60 to 80% of newborns; 114.000 of these newborns die yearly and 63.000 children will survive with kernicterus (severe brain damage) due to undiagnosed or late detection of jaundice. Just in Europe and USA, we estimate that neonatal jaundice costs healthcare systems €1.684 million per year. Current solutions for jaundice diagnosis require expensive hospital laboratory facilities for blood testing and newborn monitoring by professional healthcare workers. Additionally, low-income countries cannot afford blood tests and longer hospital stays to detect and treat jaundice properly. To solve this problem, Picterus has created a remote, reliable and low-cost tool with an innovative Smartphone-based system to provide remote diagnosis and monitoring of neonatal jaundice. Our unique technology based in biomedical optics and photonics detects bilirubin levels by taking babies ́ skin pictures, automatically interpreting the results. Picterus can be included in the routine newborn tests at hospitals worldwide and can also be used by parents and midwives at home to monitor the baby, thus reducing healthcare system costs in three ways: reducing extra days at hospital after birth for jaundice monitoring, reducing outpatient follow-up of patients and reducing the number of cases of permanent brain damages due to failed or missing diagnosis. H2020 funding will allow us to leverage the development of Picterus and successfully commercialize it in the European market first, and worldwide afterwards.