Bilihome: A lead user experience in the medical devices (update 2021)

Today, exactly 7 years ago our twins Thijs and Noor came into our lives. My partner Helen ended up on the intensive care and my son Thijs on the NICU due to a combination of an infection and the need for photo therapy to treat his neonatal jaundice. The intensive (s)care motivated me to find a better solution for treatment at home of newborns that needed light therapy. Two problems needed to be solved: blood draws to track progress of bilirubin and a better way of providing light therapy to allow kangaroo care, breastfeeding and treatment at home.

The Situation Today

In Europe there are around 4 million newborns each year with jaundice. Around 300,000 of these newborns are treated for the clinical condition hyperbilirubinemia. Treatment is typically done in a high care hospital environment. There is a risk of neurological damage before the first signs of jaundice are visible. Early treatment with phototherapy improves this situation.?The current treatment is usually done with a LED or old style even with fluorescent light applied in bulk above the mostly naked newborn. As the wavelength and intensity is harmful for the eyes of the newborn they are equipped with goggles during the multiple day treatment. During treatment the baby is effectively put in the incubator and kangaroo care or breastfeeding interrupts the treatment. There are some blanket type products in market today that use a central light source with a decoupling through a glass fiber cover but they are not intelligent and hardly mobile.

A problem as starting point

The scariest moments in life motivate action. You get intrinsically motivated when you enjoy two weeks extra hospital time with your partner and your newborn twins. Already during the hospital stay I shared my frustration with the nurses and doctors treating my son. I quickly learned from the nurses and doctors that there is little priority in developing solutions for newborns. Talking to some former colleagues we quickly discovered that not only parents but also doctors and nurses were highly interested in a better solution. The problem is that there is no feasible solution in market today that allows parents to safely take their newborns home for phototherapy treatment at home. What is required is a mobile solution that allows treatment and monitoring of the treatment progress to prevent blood draws.

The solution

After developing better insight from meetings with doctors in academic hospitals and the expert researcher on phototherapy from Stanford, we found an investor for developing the solution. With support for clinical trials from two passionate pediatricians from Amphia hospital and Maasstad hospital and the head of neonatology from the Sophia childrens hospital we created Bilihome. Bilihome is a fully mobile, hospital to home enabled intelligent phototherapy solution with patented monitoring technology. This allows for newborns to be treated at home and provides the medical team with data on the progression of the therapy and wellbeing of the baby. Besides saving lives and preventing permanent brain damage for misdiagnosed newborns, it allows for €1 bilion in cost saving in Europe for just the clinical cases. It also dramatically reduces the number of painful blood draws. Bringing the Bilihome solution from hospital to home also allows preventive care for a larger group of newborns showing signs of neonatal jaundice.

The challenge

Innovation is never about technology but always about adoption and behavioural change. That is by far the biggest challenge, how do you get a solution adopted? When Apple created iTunes it didn’t just create a faster, cheaper, better digital format for music, it altered the very nature of the relationship between music and people. Our challenge is to change the behavior from treatment at the hospital to treatment at home.

Since last year we have found via NLC a wonderful CEO, Margret Huenerbein who is passionately leading the efforts to bring Bilihome to market. She has created a wonderful ecosystem of partners who have made huge steps and improvements. The current solution looks nothing like the prototype we initially engineered. The team amazingly won the Red Dot Design award and last year the team won the Rabobank Sustainable Innovation Award. With fabulous support of the advanced technology team from Philips in Drachten, the amazing Marina Toeters from Fashion Tech Farm in Eindhoven and many other partners involved we are finalizing the next investment round.

So the story continues on the twins birthday, with huge gratitude for all the wonderful people I had the privilege of meeting and working with since the start. Looking forward to the next steps under guidance and leadership from Margret.