Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - QTrobot (QTrobot Autism Therapy Store)
Teaser
Autism affects 1 in every 59 children imposing huge economic and social burdens. Early intensive therapy offers cost saving of more than $1M per child. But due to lack of therapists, most children don’t receive desirable therapy and require costly long-term institutional...
Summary
Autism affects 1 in every 59 children imposing huge economic and social burdens. Early intensive therapy offers cost saving of more than $1M per child. But due to lack of therapists, most children don’t receive desirable therapy and require costly long-term institutional care. By offering our QTrobot to special need schools, we address this problem by enabling non-specialized caregivers to replicate standard curriculums developed by autism therapists. In order to scale our business to international markets, we are developing an autism app store for professionals to create and exchange autism curriculums administered by QTrobot. This is made possible by our disruptive software technology allowing everybody with no IT knowledge to program advanced interactive applications for QTrobot. The autism app store creates more demands and markets for QTrobot and a solid competitive advantage of user generated content. It also provides a new revenue stream of commissions from the apps.
The overall objective of this project was to develop and validate an exponentially growing business plan for worldwide sales of QTrobot hardware, as well as autism curriculums by feasibility study of creating and monetizing an autism app store while addressing legal, regulatory and trust concerns as well as securing its IPR. This included: 1) legal feasibility analysis: determining legal and regulatory requirements and barriers for creating a robot app store by autism professionals to be used by peer therapists as well as non-specialized caregivers of children with autism in EU and USA, in order to ensure our compliance and minimize risks regarding the QTrobot and its app store, 2) practical feasibility analysis: understanding the perspective, incentives and concerns of both the content creators and consumers of the app store, in order to derive detailed user requirement analysis for product development as well as to develop and validate an appropriate business model to create and monetize the app store, and 3) determining suitable IPR management strategies for QT robot autism app store.
A MVP of the app store was successfully developed and tested where a group of autism professionals successfully used our software interface, with no technical assistance, to develop various applications for children with autism, administered by QTrobot, and another group of professionals used the apps developed by their peers for training of children with autism delivered through QTrobot. In addition, detailed regulatory and IPR analyses were conducted and a comprehensive business plan and financial plan were developed.
The project achieved its all objectives and concluded the feasibility of developing the autism app store which can scale worldwide with huge societal and economical impacts. A concrete strategic plan for technical and business development of the project were derived to which institutional investors have confirmed their interest to finance the implementation of the project. Furthermore, the project achieved a great success in dissemination, including winning several international awards such as the 2019 CES Innovation Award Honoree of Tech for Better World, appearing in tens of international news articles, and being chosen as a success story for the InvestEU Campaign by EU Commission (https://europa.eu/investeu/projects/qtrobot-expressive-robot-autism-therapy_en).
Work performed
1- Legal feasibility analysis:
A detailed regulatory analysis was performed by the LuxAI team, as well as by subcontracting a Contract Research Organization specialized in regulatory analysis of medical devices. This included a detailed study of the definition of autism as well as the positioning of QTrobot and its app store as a medical device. The conclusion was that, for the time being, to market the QTrobot as an assistive robot which does not fall into the definition of the medical device, and to conduct further experiments and clinical trials to declare the solution as a medical device in future, to show solid evidence for the value of the solution, to create barriers for the competition, as well as to be able to reimburse the solution by public health systems and insurances. To this end, a detailed pathway toward a medical CE and FDA approval was derived. In addition, a peer to peer review system is foreseen to ensure the quality of the content on the app store for the near future, and a plan to build a data-driven system to monitor and validate the effectiveness of the apps was developed for a longer term. This resulted in a technological roadmap which not only provides an automatic way of quality control, but also will enable us to offer evidence based personalized assessment and intervention with potential to revolutionize both the field of autism as well as socially assistive robotics for healthcare.
2- Practical feasibility analysis:
We developed a MVP of our solution for an autism app store for QTrobot. This included building a cloud server to backup and sync the apps created on a robot, including the app itself, the robot’s gestures and multi-media content such as videos, audios and images, and a software framework to easily share a selected set of apps from a user account to other accounts. The technical challenges also included, for instance, normalization of robot’s joints, in order to ensure a gesture recorded on one robot can be exactly replicated on other robots.
Two autism therapists were subcontracted to build 40 applications for QTrobot, targeting early stage development of children with autism. The therapists successfully developed the applications using our graphical interface, completely independent of the LuxAI technical team. These applications were then reviewed by two board certified therapists who provided feedback and confirmed their quality and usefulness. The applications were then shared with multiple educators and therapists who successfully used them for training of children with autism. The result of the tests in the living lab was a great success, leading to sales of robots. The achievements of the living lab was not limited to only validating the feasibility of the therapy store concept and the sales. It also supported us to create marketing materials in collaboration with the end users including several video testimonials from therapists and parents and several demonstration videos showing how the robot interacts and teaches new skills to children with autism and other mental disorders.
3- IPR management
A specialized firm was subcontracted to perform a landscape and whitespace analysis regarding the means and methods for providing support to children with autism. This included global market overview of therapeutic treatment technologies for supporting children with autism, and specially using robots, and identifying relevant patents and categorizing them according to the different technology parameters related to therapeutic treatment technologies. Total of 1149 publications were analyzed, out of which 247 were identified as relevant to the subject matter and classified according to the technology used, domain and method of application. This analysis provides a solid basis regarding the existing technologies and trends, main competitors and the most relevant patents and the whitespaces to develop a patent portfolio for formal IP protection. The next steps underway are to build
Final results
The QTrobot autism app store goes beyond the state of the art in several ways. First, it is based on a technology targeting democratization the social robots by taking socially assistive robots from research to real world environments, and enabling healthcare professionals with no IT knowledge to develop, customize and conduct robot-enhanced training for children with special need educations such as children with autism. This enables building a new types of application stores, solely developed by healthcare professionals as opposed to current application stores of robots and smart devices of which the development depends on technical teams with robotic and software engineering expertise. In addition, the autism app store of QTrobot makes standard autism therapy and training accessible as well as salable worldwide. Finally, it provides a platform to build intelligent data-driven and personalized monitoring, assessment and intervention systems advancing the state of the art of socially assistive robots as well as the field of autism.
The results of the feasibility study demonstrate a very promising opportunity, not only in terms of business opportunity, but also in terms of the potential impacts of the autism app store in increasing the access as well as the quality of service provided to children with autism, and also added values created for the autism professional:
Business impact: The inclusion of the therapy store in the business model shows it is a very interesting new source of revenue for LuxAI, allowing it to make revenue from software a considerable part of the future of the company, while also allowing to scale to the B2C market worldwide. This expand the future of LuxAI from a mainly hardware company to both hardware and software platforms provider. Furthermore, combined with the proposed intelligent recommendation system, LuxAI will lead to being a provider of disease management systems, with a much more business as well as societal impacts.
Competitive advantage and scale: The autism app store allows LuxAI to be very agile in terms of global expansion. It is not feasible for a company to easily scale and develop and validate training content for international markets with different languages, cultures and methodological differences. However, having end users as content developers allows QTrobot to be scalable for users with all kinds of languages and cultural and methodological preferences.
Expanding to new market domains: By enabling the end users and therapist to develop content for QTrobot, we are able to quickly expand our market to new domains other than the training of children with autism. The special educational need schools include children with other special needs including children with Down syndrome, mental retardation and other developmental disorders. We observed in our living lab that therapists and care givers are interested to use QTrobot for all such children, since they see added values in using the robot to improve learning opportunity, attention and engagement in all of them. Based on our experience in the living lab, allowing therapists to develop content can expand the market for QTrobot to cover all developmental disorders with total incidence rate of about 8.4%.
Improving the user acceptance: During the living lab, we witnessed that the user experience and acceptance is way higher when the users take part in the development of the solution comparing to the time that the solution is already made and they cannot have any influence on the product. Being able to develop content for the robot has been a very appealing idea for the users since each child with autism has his own skills and requirements and all the content should be customizable.
Impact on the state of the art of autism: Through the interaction with several potential customers and early adopters, we have seen that therapists are very interested in exchanging the experiences and best practices and to be able to discuss t
Website & more info
More info: http://www.luxai.com.