Have you ever wished you could get medical advice in the comfort of sitting at home? What if you can use your phone as your personal health assistant, providing quick, AI-powered insights about your well-being? That is Helfie.ai, a healthcare startup that’s turning this vision into a reality. By leveraging multi-modal AI, Helfie.ai aims to bring medical diagnostics right to your fingertips—literally. Imagine checking your vital signs or getting an early warning about potential skin issues, or respiratory diseases all with a few taps on your phone.
In this blog, we look in-depth at Helfie.ai’s journey, technology, and the vision behind this healthcare disruptor. We spoke with its CTO, Nikhil Sehgal, a Forbes 30U30 AI Engineer, who shared insights into their unique approach to healthcare AI and the challenges they’ve overcome.
The Birth of Helfie.ai: Inspiration and Background
Nik, the CTO of Helfie.ai comes from a mathematics background with significant experience in finance being a Deep Learning Engineer for algorithmic trading desks. While this world may seem distant from healthcare, the predictive nature of finance provided a valuable foundation for spotting trends—a skill equally applicable in healthcare.
The inspiration for Helfie.ai stemmed from the inherent inefficiencies of remote monitoring in healthcare. Traditional devices are expensive, bulky, and difficult to manage. Nik’s vision was simple yet ambitious: reduce the cost of remote monitoring by 100x and make healthcare accessible to anyone with a smartphone.
This vision introduced Helfie.ai, which allows users to monitor their vitals and respiratory health and screen for skin cancer using nothing more than their smartphone camera. The idea was to democratize healthcare by eliminating the need for specialized, costly devices.
Tackling the Pain Points in Healthcare Diagnostics
Helfie.ai addresses the three key pain points in healthcare diagnostics today—cost, accessibility, and efficiency. Traditionally, expensive devices and logistical challenges have bogged down remote healthcare monitoring, for being accessible to folks across the globe These barriers make it difficult for patients, particularly in rural areas or underprivileged communities, to receive timely care.
Through the Helfie.ai app, patients can quickly check for a number of potential health issues and share these assessments with healthcare professionals. This makes early detection more feasible, especially for respiratory problems or skin abnormalities. However, Helfie.ai clearly states that their app provides tentative indications rather than definitive diagnoses, emphasizing the importance of professional medical consultation. You can observe this as a real-world example of an AI application being integrated with human supervision to adhere to ethical AI practices and ensure accountability stays with healthcare professionals.
The Technology Stack: Powering AI Diagnostics
When it comes to Helfie.ai’s technical stack, a significant amount of thought went into selecting the right technologies to balance accuracy, speed, and user accessibility. The platform’s core relies on computer vision (CV) and medical image processing, allowing the app to analyze images and videos from a patient's smartphone.
One of the most substantial challenges they faced was making this technology scalable. As the CTO explains, “Streaming texts or images is computationally manageable, but video? That’s another story.” Streaming video diagnostics in real-time is resource-intensive, requiring high upload speeds (up to 100 Mbps), which most users don’t have.
Helfie.ai innovated around this problem by changing how video is processed. Rather than streaming the entire video, they developed a method that only streams areas of interest, drastically reducing the required bandwidth from 100 Mbps to just 0.7 Mbps. This breakthrough makes the app usable for virtually anyone with a smartphone, without needing a premium internet connection.
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