Dare To Change

HKSTPC Silver Technopreneur Award - CLAIRE Clinical AI Research

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a debilitating disease for many middle-aged and elderly people with no cure. Unfortunately, most KOA cases are not caught and treated in time, so patients require expensive surgery to replace the knee joint. This has led to an annual preventable health cost of HK$1.4 billion. Therefore, early detection is critical for timely interventions to prevent disease progression and knee replacement surgery.

CLAIRE develops the multi-award-winning AI-driven KOA management system to facilitate early diagnosis with personalised treatment protocols, and empower patient self-management.

To promote wellness proactivity over illness reactivity, we are collaborating with NGOs to deliver health training workshops to both the elderly and their caregivers. We have also developed the state-of-the-art AI-powered KOA prognostic system to predict the user’s risk of KOA progression with detailed risk factor analysis. It assists family doctors in the identification of high-risk patients dwelling in the community and accurate case referral to appropriate specialists and therapists. Therefore, patients can receive pre-emptive and personalised interventions that slow joint degeneration and reduce the unwarranted use of hospital services.

In our free-of-charge self-management mobile application, we first boost self-insurance by in-app risk assessment. To further capture the users' interest whenever and wherever the symptoms of KOA are felt, individualised evidence-based exercises coupled with other educational and motivational components, such as diet and behavioural modifications, are provided according to their assessment results to alleviate KOA symptoms.

We are also extending our impact to the secondary healthcare settings by collaborating with practising orthopaedic specialists, radiologists, and allied health therapists with multiple published research papers and a planned clinical trial later this year. We will employ our AI-driven prognostic system in the hospital to analyse additional knee medical images and biomarkers for automatic grading, accurate triage, personalised treatments, and objective functional outcome measurement for optimal treatment outcomes.

For more information, please contact dare.to.change@ydc.org.hk

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