How a start-up from Aachen wants to change intensive care medicine

Clinomic has developed Mona, an AI designed to assist physicians. The corona pandemic has given the young company a strong boost.

Mona does not leave the side of the patients, can see them at any time and when the doctors hurl questions about vital signs at her, she immediately trumpets the current situation in the patients' bodies.

Mona is, there's no mistaking it, not a human assistant, but a digital one. Founded in 2019, the Aachen-based start-up Clinomic has developed the artificially intelligent assistant over the past few years and brought it to market. What started out as a small spin-off from RWTH Aachen University is now a full-fledged company with around 50 employees and an eight-figure funding sum, which the company has collected. Most recently, another seven million euros were added.

The original idea is relatively simple: doctors today are much smarter than they used to be because they have more data - but at the same time they are overwhelmed by the flood of information. As a rule, the dozens of machines produce about 1,000 data points per hour for an intensive care patient, which is almost impossible for a doctor to keep track of, says Arne Peine, one of the six founders. "Today, doctors handwrite down the most important data so that they are even up to date. That's crazy and costs a lot of time."

"Today, doctors handwrite down the most important data so that they are up to date at all. That's crazy and costs a lot of time."

Arne Peine, Co-Founder Clinomic

Mona, the heart of Clinomics, is designed to put an end to this madness, according to the vision. The digital assistant looks like an overgrown tablet hanging from a pivoting arm, a display in front, plus eight microphones, various speakers. Also built in are a 180-degree camera, a 5G antenna, AI chips and a touch display.

Mona collects the data from the machines around it, processes it and uses algorithms to calculate how the individual values are likely to develop in the coming hours. If a value becomes important according to her calculation in eight hours, she tells the doctor. To do this, an algorithm decides which values are really important and picks them out for him. If the doctor wants to write something down, he or she can dictate it to Mona. "The clipboard is still standard in many hospitals, but it's long out of date. Mona changes that," says co-founder Peine.

Peine himself is a trained intensive care physician, so he knows the needs of local doctors. In 2019, he and his five co-founders took the plunge into self-employment. Initially, they squatted on top of each other in a room in Aachen that was far too small; their startup was financed by the public sector and also the European Union. Later, the founders raised additional money, which made it possible to put their device into series production as well. "The first machines here were assembled by five engineers with a screwdriver, it's all much more professional now," says Arne Peine.

"The first machines here were assembled by five engineers with a screwdriver, it's all much more professional now"

Arne Peine, Co-Founder Clinomic

This is also evident in the latest order, which comes directly from the European Union. They are to deliver 200 devices to eight countries to fight the pandemic. In the process, Mona will be used to monitor patients, but also provide telemedicine support to the professionals. This means doctors who are not on site can look at intensive care patients, view their data and thus help with decision-making. Especially with hospitals far from large cities or even on islands, the necessary personnel are not always on site, Peine says. When the corona pandemic broke out, the EU Commission sat down with Clinomic and asked them to deliver Mona to remote regions like the island of Madeira off the coast of Portugal. In general, demand for Mona surged during the Corona crisis, with hundreds of devices ordered, he said. "We were barely keeping up with deliveries," Peine says.

In addition to the day-to-day challenges of any startup, Clinomic operates in a highly sensitive area, one that deeply invades patient privacy and requires a corresponding amount of protection. Already in the past, hospitals have been hacked, their data locked or read. None of this should ever happen to Clinomic, which uses the 180-degree camera at Mona to record patients, among other things. "We have therefore completely abandoned the idea of a cloud. It makes everything more complicated, but there's no other way," says Peine.

What he means is that in the cloud, speech recognition, for example, could be improved much faster and other computing capacities could be accessed. Instead, Mona moves with its data only within the hospital walls, has no connection to the outside. "That's how we ensure that no one from the outside can hack in," says Peine.

Mona is not intended to replace the doctor, by the way. Mona, Peine stresses, will always remain a referral system, not one that makes decisions or gives a drug on its own. Mona, as Clinomic CEO Peine makes clear, will only make the doctor more effective.