EVOCAL Health awarded with "Digital Innovation Award" by the German Federal Ministry of Economics
©Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz
Berlin/Hamburg (Germany), April 12, 2022: Digital technologies have become an indispensable part of everyday life and are also rapidly gaining importance in healthcare: data analyses, artificial intelligence and novel biomarkers offer enormous opportunities for the future of patient-centered healthcare. The Hamburg-based company EVOCAL Health is working on highly innovative new biomarkers and has been awarded with the Digital Innovation Award ("Gründungspreis Digitale Innovationen") by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection for its work.
With the "Digital Innovations Competition", the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (BMWK) honors innovative and upstarting digital companies in the field of information and communications technology (ICT) that stand out for their high degree of innovation, unique selling propositions, customer benefits, market potential and competitiveness. Dr. Anna Christmann, Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Start-ups at the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, presented the award at the online awards ceremony.
EVOCAL Health is a biopharmaceutical digital health company unlocking the human voice as a biomarker for AI-based detection and treatment of cardiovascular, respiratory and mental/neurodegenerative diseases (so-called vocal biomarkers).
Dirk Simon, Co-Founder of EVOCAL Health explains how the technology works: "The human voice is one of the most complex systems in our body. A large number of organs are involved in its development, and in science and research we have been able to show within the last few years that a variety of diseases significantly alter the physiology of the vocal systems and are barely audible to the human ear. Our technology searches for characteristic features in the audio signal of the voice that are associated with a clinical outcome and thus can be used for diagnosis, progression monitoring or grading the severity of a disease."
Vocal biomarkers are considered the future technology of digital health and have the potential to fundamentally change the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. "The intelligent linking of clinical and patient-specific data promises enormous advances in medical research and patient care, as well as in predicting future disease events. As a company with international ambitions, we are in a global competition and we are very pleased to receive this prestigious award in Germany", adds EVOCAL Health Co-Founder Philip Mertes.