Software developer Intron Health has raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding with the aim of developing clinical speech recognition technologies in developing countries, with initial focus on countries within Africa.
Intron Health reports that its speech recognition platform is capable of identifying more than 200 accents, developed through a “robust dataset of over 3.5 million audio clips” from over 18,000 contributors across 29 countries. At present, the tech is utilised in over 30 hospitals in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda, with CEO Tobi Olatunji MD stating that the platform has a 92 percent accuracy rate and has been shown to reduce documentation time “by sevenfold”.
The funding round was led by Microtraction with support from Plug and Play Tech Center, Jaza Rift, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, Openseed VC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel and BakerBridge Capital.
Olatunji states: “As we celebrate this milestone, we remain committed to harnessing the power of localised voice technology to revolutionise healthcare and explore new applications across different sectors.”
In other news from Africa, we reported how The Gauteng Department of Health in South Africa has begun the process of digitising patient records within its public hospitals, setting a target for 800 million to be digitised over the next three years as a “minimum”.
We also highlighted the announcement from South African companies Altron HealthTech and Dischem Oncology on their collaboration to develop a solution designed to provide clinicians with access to digital health advances, to reduce the cost of digital health infrastructure and increase access to approved treatment protocols and clinical workflows.
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