Dutch Medtech scaleup Active Cues bags first prize at EIT Digital Challenge 2018

Utrecht-based Medtech scaleup Active Cues recently won the top prize at the EIT Digital Challenge awards 2018 under the category of Digital Wellbeing. The event was held in Brussels, Belgium on October 18th and the Dutch scaleup got awarded for its care innovation device Tovertafel. As the part of the price package, the company will be receiving €100,000, which will be €50,000 in cash and €50,000 in the form of support for further growth.

Tovertafel — What you need to know

Active Cues developed Tovertafel, a little box that can be mounted on the ceiling above the dining room table of a daycare or home care. Inside the box, there’s a high-quality projector, infrared sensors, speakers and a processor that work together to project games on the table. The Tovertafel offers games specially designed for people with dementia and adults with a learning disability. The games were developed particularly for the target groups in order to stimulate physical and social activity.

Founded in 2014, Active Cues is headed by co-founder Sjoerd Wennekes and Mathijs Konings. This scaleup has now grown from five to 45 people in three years, is aimed at stimulating physical, social and mental activity for people with cognitive challenges. The first Tovertafel is the result of PhD research by Hester Le Riche to break apathy through the activation of people in the later stages of dementia.

Active Cues in EIT Digital Challenge 2018

In the EIT Digital Challenge Active Cues competed with a German, a Swedish, an Austrian and a Danish company. audEERING from Germany engages in intelligent audio analysis for speech, music and sound that recognises emotions, the Austrian MedicusAI has an Artificial Intelligence based platform that converts health data to interactive experiences, the non-invasive sensor from Swedish scaleup Minut detects events in spaces without the need for cameras. Also, the Danish Monsenso comes with a mobile app for prevention, intervention and treatment of mental illnesses.

The jury consisted of Andrea Conti and Peter Gullander from EIT Digital, Katrin Geyskens from Capricorn ICT, Furio Gramatica from the Don Gnocchi Foundation, Alberto Prado from Philips Healthworks and Computable Editor-in-Chief Sander Hulsman. EIT Digital is a European educational organisation that focuses on digitisation and innovation.

The EIT Digital Challenge is a European competition to identify the best deep tech innovations in Europe in one of the categories Digital Wellbeing, Digital Infrastructure, Digital Finance, Digital Industry and Digital Cities. In total, 25 finalists were selected from eleven European countries and were shortlisted from more than 200 applications. On average, the finalists – startups in a growth phase – employ 38 people, a turnover of €1.2 million in 2017 and an average funding of €4.2 million.

Further, the EIT Digital Accelerator is a pan European team of distributed, hands-on business developers and fundraising experts operating from 15 cities across Europe, along with a hub in Silicon Valley. Since 2012, they have supported nearly 300 startups who raised a total of €400 million in investment, with €100 million directly facilitated by the Accelerator.

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