Dr Santosh Kaur has accumulated nearly 17 years of healthcare experience in India and Australia. Her biggest achievement? Building smart technology to measure the length and depth of wounds.
Kaur, now 40, always had an interest in wounds, their impact on people’s lives and their families.
“A strong memory from my childhood is seeing my uncle, a doctor, dress a wound on my grandmother’s back, as she grimaced in pain,” Amritsar-born Kaur recalls.
Many years later, Kaur would choose wound care as a professional development option during her career. “Working in aged care undoubtedly opened my eyes to the glaring gaps in the care required to tend to wounds.”
Kaur was frustrated to see the gaps in wound care mainly because the wounds have always been measured manually.
“Having experienced aged care issues at various levels – from bedside management to understanding the ecosystem – it grew on me that problem was major, but had always been understated.”
So in 2021, she began researching the idea of building a technology to find an alternative for manual measurement and manual sharing of important wound data. Finally in October 2022, she launched SmartHeal – an app that assists healthcare professionals in providing optimum wound care by analysing the wound tissue for infection, moisture and providing suggestions for suitable dressing.
Kaur recently won a Women Changing the World award in the Emerging Leader of the Year category. Her initiative has also found mention in the Australian Health Journal.
Healing smartly
Kaur’s journey from an Ayurvedic doctor in India to a public health expert and entrepreneur in Australia is truly remarkable.
After moving to Melbourne in 2009, she chose to work as a nurse, specialising in aged care.
Her experience highlighted the inefficiencies in wound care, where measurements were often imprecise.
“I was convinced in my heart that there is a real problem here that is worth solving but is ‘unsexy’ business,” she explains. “Even now, we are told to remove the images of wounds from our slides. More importantly, I believed that I understood how painful and cumbersome it is to do measurements with rulers and dipsticks.”
Kaur reveals that 80% of wound measurements vary from clinician to clinician.
AI seemed to be the answer.
“When I started researching this idea in 2021, AI was not as widely known a concept as today, and hence my idea of ‘no touch’ measurements was also contested.”
When she interviewed software companies to partner with her to build the technology, she was met with skepticism.
“Australia is a highly regulated country and healthcare is regulated even more. For SmartHeal, this meant spending many millions of dollars on trials, and on regulatory pathways before even launching a very basic version. Unique databases are key for AI businesses. For a startup to start collecting patient data in this heavily regulated environment is almost impossible.”
The option was to either kill the idea, find large sums of money to run trials before going to the market, or come up with a product that could bypass all of these.
“Collecting patient data in healthcare in Australia is an uphill battle for a new found company,” she shares. “It required us to structure properly, for me as a founder to build my profile and credibility, have a solid advisory board, and build the right network before we could collect any data.”
Offering long-distance assistance
SmartHeal facilitates remote assistance, i.e., it can help people manage wound care where transport is not easy.
“In the rural parts, it is difficult to receive any care at all, let alone specialist care,” Kaur says. “SmartHeal intends to democratise healthcare by bringing the otherwise expensive wound care for these patients. SmartHeal will do so via its platform reducing the need for hours of travelling, saving time, money and hassle.”
So, how does the app work?
“SmartHeal’s technology enables users to take an image with their smartphone and provides automatic subjective measurements,” Kaur explains. “It provides those measurements via an algorithm in the backend which we continue to train on various datasets. SmartHeal utilises relevant wound parameters such as tissue analysis in the wound bed to provide information about wound health.”
The response to her app so far, she says, has been incredible.
“Clinicians have almost breathed a sigh of relief to realise that someone is trying to address this massive understated problem,” Kaur tells Indian Link. “We have been able to garner the support of world class international clinicians because of this very reason. Clinicians have proactively provided feedback on what they would like to see in the platform, what other features would be helpful to make their life easier.”
Kaur is attempting to take SmartHeal to India, too. During a recent trip, she met with Public Health Foundation of India, AIIMS New Delhi and various other key stakeholders including home care and dressing companies.
“It is not easy however, and the journey has only started,” she says.
READ MORE: Using AI for detecting facial palsy: Prof Javaan Chahl of UniSA