AIH Foundation, Italy's Penknife team up for smart medical care push

The AIH Foundation, a Singapore-headquartered medical equipment management agency, has signed an agreement with Penknife Investment Srl, an Italian association that introduces the country's high-tech enterprises to China, to co-develop smart medical wearable devices with embedded graphene sensors.

The foundation will work with the University of Pisa. Their cooperation will entail an investment of about 100 million yuan ($14.5 million), which will be raised from crowd-funding platforms and institutional investors, the AIH Foundation said.

The foundation has a research and development center in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. The project-related R&D work is expected to finish by next year, to be followed by large-scale production. The products will be sold globally, and China will serve as a major market.

Graphene sensors, which are sensitive enough to detect neurochemicals like dopamine and biochemicals like glucose, will serve as core components of the medical devices and in the form of smart bracelets. The latter will be able to monitor and measure the duration and quality of sleep.

Andrea Cincotto, secretary-general of Penknife Investment Srl, said consumers can wear the bracelets for a week to constantly record and monitor data of sleeping rhythm. Such data will be continuously and automatically transmitted to cloud computing servers for analysis.

"The application of blockchain technology will ensure the accuracy and effectiveness of the data collected, and help better store medical data. Then, we will analyze the data by our patented algorithm. The collected data is suitable for making medical diagnoses and finding solutions to the disturbance encountered," he said.

The AIH Foundation's core management comprises professionals with rich work experience in the high-tech medical equipment field. They also have experience in forging cooperation deals with a number of top hospitals in South China.

For instance, the foundation has set up a research group for tumor prevention and control center at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. Their aim is to develop the blockchain electronic medical case system to tackle lung cancer and liver diseases. They will also try to break the information isolation of medical systems and promote information interconnection and interchange.

In 2016, the Chinese government proposed the "Healthy China 2030" initiative, the country's first national-level medium- to long-term strategic plan for national health and well-being.

Currently, the health sector in China contributes about 6 percent to the GDP, lower than the average 10 percent of developed countries. The initiative forecasts that by 2020, the total scale of the healthcare-related sector in China will exceed 8 trillion yuan.

Yin Dakui, former deputy director of the National Health Commission, said smart medical care has become a sector with significant business opportunities. It will help to improve the current situation of medical services and push forward the development of the medical care sector in China.