February 25, 2025 • 28 mins
Pedro Oliveira: User Innovation in Healthcare
Welcome to a new series inspired by Eric Von Hippel, and sponsored by Wazoku. In today's episode, we are joined by Professor Pedro Oliveira, founder and president of Patient Innovation, to explore the role of patients and caregivers in developing new medical products and services. Discover remarkable stories of user-generated medical innovations, such as Tal Golesworthy's life-saving aortic support and Louis Plante's innovative lung-clearing device. Learn how Patient Innovation is helping to bring these solutions to market through a multi-sided platform that connects patient innovators with industry. Find out more about this transformative approach to healthcare innovation and the positive impact it has had on countless lives.
00:00 Introduction to the Series and Sponsor
00:29 Focus on User Innovation in Healthcare
00:53 Interview with Professor Pedro Oliveira
01:20 Eric von Hippel's Influence on User Innovation
03:55 Patient Innovator Stories: Tal Golesworthy
05:17 Patient Innovator Stories: Louis Plante
12:35 Patient Innovator Stories: Hans and Be My Eyes
19:06 The Multi-Sided Platform for Patient Innovation
25:35 Encouraging More Patient Innovations
27:26 Conclusion and Sponsor Message
Find Pedro https://patient-innovation.com/who
Find Wazoku: www.Wazoku.com
User Innovation, Healthcare Innovation, Patient-Driven Innovation, Medical Breakthroughs, Pedro Oliveira, Eric von Hippel, Tal Golesworthy, ExoVasc, Louis Plante, Flutter Device, Hans Be My Eyes, Be My Eyes, Multi-Sided Platforms, Patient Entrepreneurship, Medical Devices, Assistive Technology, Digital Health, Open Innovation, Future of Medicine, Patient Advocacy, Caregiver Innovation
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to our new series inspiredby the work of Eric Von Hippel.
This series is sponsoredby our friends at Wazoku.
Wazoku are pioneers of total innovation,transforming how organizations solve
challenges, drive growth, and delivermeasurable results as the world's only
networked innovation marketplace, Wazokuconnects people, ideas, and technology
(00:23):
to create scalable, impactful innovation.
And you can find Wazoku at wazoku.
com.
In today's episode, we focus onfascinating research on user innovation
and more specifically on the role ofpatients, caregivers, in the development
of new medical products and services.
We are joined by the founder andpresident of patient innovation.
(00:47):
He has many, many decorations to his namethat I'm not going to go through today.
You can look them up online.
We welcome to the show.
Professor Pedro Oliveira.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
That was a very goodpronunciation, by the way.
So
I was practicing man.
I was practicing I wasforcing my practice on top
of Pedro off air beforehand.
(01:08):
And I got there in the end.
Great to have you with us,
It's very nice to be on your show.
Thank you for inviting me.
We have so much to share.
You have some amazing examplesof patient or caregiver.
user generated innovations but i thoughtwe'd start through the lens of what
we've done before with your frienderic von Hippel with the previous guest
(01:30):
on the show, and eric's main conceptof user innovation paradigm because
in a way it's like lenses through whichyou see your work, i thought what we
do is i throw up on the screen thediagram that we've covered eric before.
But i'd love your take on thatand then we'll take our audience
through some examples that you'vediscovered through your platform.
(01:53):
Again.
Thank you for so much forhaving me in your show.
As you just mentioned, the workof Eric von Hippel has been a
big influence on my own work.
His work is very influential anyway,he has created a big community of
people that actually work in this areaof open and user innovation and even
created a society that is entitledthe Open and User Innovation Society.
(02:17):
And what you see there is basically a goodsummary of some of the things that Eric
and some colleagues have, published about.
You see there that, in fact, Prior touser and open innovation, we had this
notion of producer innovation, whichis basically when companies develop
(02:37):
new products, new services withobjective of bringing them to market,
with objective of commercializing, ofmaking Profits out of those innovations.
And that's one of thearrows that you see there.
On top of that, you see the redarrow, which is the one that
represents user innovation.
(02:58):
And the goal here is that in fact,if you look at the, you know, there's
a timeline, right, quite often, infact, before producers bring new
products to Users did it already.
You know, they don't necessarilybring the products to markets because
(03:19):
that's not what motivates them.
But because users are motivated bythe fact that sometimes they have
strong needs and they need to fixthose needs, they end up, , developing
new devices, new solutions that theyeventually bring to market as well.
In fact, we were inspired by these.
And at some point in our research, westart looking at the field of healthcare.
(03:43):
We were very intrigued because we startfinding the patients that in some cases
actually managed to save their lives.
And this was obviously very powerful.
Let me give you an example.
I was very, very intrigued whenwe bump into Tal Golesworthy.
Tal Golesworthy is a guy from England.
(04:03):
He's an engineer that at somepoint was told by his doctor.
that due to his Marfan syndromecondition, so he's a Marfan syndrome
patient, he was at risk of dying.
And the risk here was that his waterwas at risk of having a rupture
and this eventually would kill him.
And the doctor was actually not very nicein terms of giving him, a good forecast.
(04:26):
He told him, look, we anticipate thatthis could even happen within 24 months.
Long story short, Tal went on thinkingabout his own problem and realized
that, wow, maybe I could come up with asolution because if I have a pipe, right?
Of course, I'm talking about his award,but for an engineer, it was just a
(04:48):
pipe, that is going to have a rupture.
I just don't wait for this to happen.
I try to do something about it.
And long story short, actually, there wasworth it managed to develop an awarding
support to put around his own award.
Well, not just to save hislife, but in fact, over 1000.
(05:10):
Patients have received the same awardingsupport that was developed by this guy.
And, we were inspired by peoplelike him or Louis Plante.
Louis Plante has a different situation.
Louis was sadly, he passed awayalready, was a cystic fibrosis patient.
Among many other complications.
(05:33):
These patients have these mucusthat accumulate in the lungs.
And part of the problem is thatthis can create infections that
sometimes actually kill the patients.
This is still a fatal disease.
And of course, we knew this very well.
We suffered a lot as a kid because hehad to do all the traditional treatments.
(05:58):
And by the way, he was lucky in a way.
Because for a long time, thelife expectancy for these
patients was five years.
Five years meaning, kidswould not grow into adulthood.
They would die on average age of five.
And , what was the solution?
Because there was this mucus thataccumulated in the lungs, What people
(06:22):
have, developed the solutions werethings like chest clapping, both in
the front and also in the, back to tryto remove the mucus from the lungs.
In fact, doctors, call it the socalled ketchup bottle principle.
I mean, think about this, right?
(06:44):
I mean, if we have ketchup andif we need to take it out, what
we do is that we clap it as well.
So that's what we did to kidsfor a long, long time, right?
Doing all this clapping and thenturning kids upside down, shaking
them so that the mucus would come out.
And of course this was not veryefficient as you can imagine.
(07:04):
So some patients, and I've talkedwith many, , would describe this as
excruciating because if you're doing allthese treatments was really bad, , Louis
had to do four hours of treatment perday, which basically means having his
mother, for instance, or his caregiver.
doing the chest clapping andsometimes his body was hurting
(07:26):
already because, they were ill.
. So this was reallydifficult for the patients.
And what happened one day toLouis was very intriguing to him.
One day he went to a concert andwhat happened in that concert
changed his life , it was classicalmusic and he was sitting there.
And of course, when you go to a concertthe expectation is that you remain silent,
(07:50):
but he couldn't , he was feeling veryuncomfortable during the concert, and
the music was causing this discomfort.
What was happening was that the vibrationsfrom the music were shaking , his lungs.
And of course this wascausing a lot of discomfort.
He was coughing most of the time, peoplearound him were giving him these weird
(08:14):
looks like, come on, it's a concert.
You should remain silent.
He didn't leave during this firsthalf of the concert and to everyone's
surprise during the break, he was fine.
So of course there was no music.
That was even worse, right?
Because the people aroundhim were really irritated.
You know, this was the guy thatwas coughing most of the time.
(08:34):
And now during the break, he was fine.
But the second part wasa different endement.
It was Shostakovich.
Boom, boom.
The music was A bit violent for him.
And in fact, he was sittingthere feeling very uncomfortable.
And at some point he had to leave theconcert and this crisis of spectoration
(08:54):
at the door of the concert hall, and wenthome afterwards thinking about it, right?
Why did it happen?
And he realized that of course itwas the vibration from the music.
And he went down thinking that.
Well, of course, in a concerthall, like he had experienced, this
was a bad thing, but maybe if hecould control it, this could work.
(09:16):
And he went home and startexperimenting with speakers.
So we would , use speakers that you wouldput in front of his lungs so that you
would get the vibrations from the musicand it could even control the music.
And it was very interestingbecause, I realized that it's
not really the music that works.
The best, the best would be boom, boom.
(09:37):
And of course it wasn't necessarilypleasant to listen to that.
He realized that if you couldremove the music and just leave
some strong vibrations, this wouldbe the best to clear the lungs.
, we plan to develop theFrequencer, which is a machine
that many of these patients use.
And when they want to clear the lungs,And I've seen patients doing this
(09:59):
in my own office, at some point,for instance, did, that with me.
He asked me if he could put the thingin front of his legs, which he did.
And for maybe 15, 20 minutes.
We were talking and I could hear hisvoice and of course there was a bit of
vibration in his voice because he wasgetting the vibration in the lungs.
But, afterwards he asked forthe toilets and I think he
(10:22):
obviously did his pectoration.
And he did the treatmentas he was there, to me.
And of course this was remarkablebecause it was again a solution
that was developed by a patient.
And I could go on because in fact,what we realized at some point was
that there were many patients likethis out there when I say many and,
(10:45):
you know, I'm sure there's even more.
It was very interesting because atsome point we realized that maybe we
could try to collect some of these.
And what we did was to develop an onlineplatform, and then we invited patient
innovators, as we call them, patientsthat actually develop innovative devices
for themselves, not necessarily withobjective of bringing them to market,
(11:09):
even if sometimes that's what's happening,that's what happens, but with objective
of using them in the very first place.
And, you know, we startgetting all sorts of solutions.
So we had to invite a team of medicaldoctors to help us in the assessment
of the solutions because we werealso getting a lot of crazy stuff.
(11:30):
But now we have a big portfolio ofsolutions like these that we share.
Sometimes we even help themto actually commercialize, the
solutions that bring them to market.
So among other things, what we didwas we actually started an award,
what we call the patient innovationaward . And this is something we
(11:53):
have done in Lisbon several times.
We also did it in Paris.
We did it in Copenhagen, in Denmark.
So the goal is to Invite peoplefrom all over the world to submit
what they have and see what are someof the most influential solutions
that these guys have developed.
And some of thesesolutions are remarkable.
(12:15):
And you know, what we do then is wecreated this award to of course,
recognize them for the impactthat I, that they are having.
Let me give you an example.
For instance this past year in2024, we did another edition of
our patient innovation award.
And one of the technologies thatgot an award is truly remarkable.
(12:41):
This is something that was developedin Denmark by a guy, his name is Hans.
Hans is.
almost blind.
It's not totally blind, but he cansee some light and that's about it.
Well, it's hard for us to evenunderstand how difficult it is.
(13:02):
The life of someone that doesn't see.
But of course, for someone with thiscondition things at home, simple
things like choosing what is the rightcan that you want to open, right?
You have a tomato juice and the soup andthe only one is the one that you want
to open and you have no clue which oneis the one that you are looking for.
(13:24):
And , because he wanted to be asindependent as possible, he at some
point start realizing that His camerain the iPhone could really help him
because with the camera he could doa video call and you know of course
I could do this with you, right?
If I needed help.
Look, I'm here trying to figure out whichone is the right can, can you help me?
(13:46):
And you tell me, hey Pedro, Ithink if you want the tomato
juice, go for the one at the right.
And I would say, Hey,okay, thank you so much.
That's really helpful.
And, of course, I mean Hans was doingthis , well, in the beginning with
some of his friends, and then he startsrealizing, well, poor people, right?
I'm always calling the same group ofpeople, and this could be much more
(14:07):
interesting if, in fact, On one side, if Icould find a pool of volunteers that could
help people that have these sort of needs.
And what he did was truly remarkablebecause in fact, he created
this app that people can use.
I use it a lot.
I'm opening it.
(14:27):
And as of now, as of, as we speak,in fact, there are over 8, 500, 000
volunteers in the website, in the appthat have helped more than 786, 000
people that are either blind or have lowvision or some sort of eye condition.
(14:49):
So of course that's millions of peoplehelping, almost a million people, right?
Or at different points, at leastthese people have asked for help.
But this is not the end of the story.
Think about it.
This guy is amazing by the way.
So as you can imagine, startinga new project, starting
a firm is extremely hard.
(15:11):
We can just imagine how hard it isfor someone that is almost blind.
He did it in Denmark and ofcourse he was very happy when he
realized that he had already morevolunteers than the population.
Of his country, which isagain, truly remarkable.
And then at some point you realize that,sometimes rather than calling a person,
(15:32):
which could be, of course, not the bestthing to do, if you are at home, your
house is very disorganized and , you don'tnecessarily want to call a person, right?
Maybe AI can help andthink about it, right?
AI can help because AI can clearlydescribe what's in front of me.
And the, what basically, so thisproject is called Be My Eyes.
(15:56):
And basically now, one option thatthe patients have is to, rather
than calling a person, of course,this is still there, this option.
There are still, as I just mentioned, over8 million people that are willing to help.
But AI can eventually help describingwhat these guys cannot see.
And some of the use cases,obviously you haven't seen them.
(16:20):
I really encourage you to have a lookbecause it's truly amazing what what
I've seen some blind people doing, forinstance, navigating in London, of
course, sightseeing speaking rightwhere AI is describing everything.
And at some point, for instanceone of these guys wants to get the
taxi and there's a lot of traffic.
(16:41):
And the AI, AI, AI.
The app that was developed for them byOpenAI is one of the best use cases that
I've seen, in fact, of OpenAI technology.
There's a lot of cars passing byand basically the app tells him,
look, if you want to get a taxi, Iwill tell you when you should hail.
(17:02):
And there's a, thisis a blind guy, right?
With a camera in frontof him with his phone.
But the phone tells him, please hail.
And the taxi stops in front of him.
But this is even not the end ofthe story, because if you think
about it, of course, for all ofus, it wouldn't make much sense.
If you want to see to, to use acell phone in front of us, right?
(17:25):
We have eyes.
And even if they cannot use them in thesame way that we do, they have eyes too.
What basically they realize isthat they could use glasses.
And now, Ray Ban has developed someglasses for them that have cameras, small
cameras in fact, that have also speakersthat tell them, it's again, AI, right?
(17:48):
They look very nice, in fact.
And as they navigate, in the streetsof any city or at home the technology
is describing them what is going on.
So the main point is, of course, AI ischanging everything, but what AI is also
doing for patient innovators, for userentrepreneurs, for, user innovators in
(18:11):
general, in particular in healthcareis, truly remarkable because all of us
now, of course, can have the help of thetechnology that can really change lives.
And what we have observedis that this is happening.
In fact, we have introduced AI models inour training and some of these patient
innovators, and this is truly remarkable.
(18:33):
How the solutions that we are nowgetting are so much better already.
Because of course, of courseit can help you and me.
So of course it can also help peoplethat have some sort of disadvantage
because there's something therethat is willing to help you.
That's what we are observing.
Incredible, incredible.
(18:53):
This all started out of curiosityby you and studying this work.
And then you built a platformand it's a, an organization.
Not a for profit organizationthat you essentially run, but
You enable, profitability by bringing in,it's a multi sided platform, so therefore.
Industry can get involved let's sharea little bit about that how it's multi
(19:16):
sided platform so who are the sides of the
Yeah.
Much of
so when we started, we were just focusingon freely sharing what we have, meaning,
you know, everything that we were findingor that people could actually submit to
the platform was freely shared online.
And still the majority of what we havein the site is being freely shared.
(19:41):
Then what we realized was that,sometimes the patient, The innovator
doesn't necessarily want to do that.
In some cases, for instance, theywanted to become entrepreneurs.
They wanted to be the ones thatwanted to further develop what
they have and bring that to market.
When we realized that, we createda second option for these patients.
(20:02):
So we created these, we were verylucky to start with, because we
got a grant from EIT ELF, whichis a large European organization.
It stands for European Institute ofTechnology, and then they work in
several areas, ELF is one of them.
And it's in fact a big consortium ofalmost 300 healthcare organizations.
(20:24):
And they gave us a bit of money to helpthese patients develop what they have.
, what we did was a bootcamp thatbasically brings some of these patient
innovators to Lisbon and then toBarcelona, to IESE in Barcelona.
So in Lisbon, they work withmy own school, Nova School of
Business and Economics, as wellas with the Nova Medical School.
(20:45):
Then they moved to Barcelona wherethey will focus more on issues
of business plan development.
They work at the IESEBusiness School in Spain.
And finally, they go to CopenhagenBusiness School in Copenhagen in Denmark.
In this program, we help themfurther develop what they have.
(21:06):
First, we select them,people have to apply.
We select them, we then fund them, theyget a small grant to travel to these
places, etc. The program is free.
And this is for those that want toactually further develop what they have
and bring what they have to market.
(21:27):
As you can imagine, this isnot always possible, right?
We are talking about a very unusualtype of entrepreneur, right?
We are talking about patients.
And of course, sometimes, these patientsare afflicted with serious diseases and
it's not their priority to bring solutionsto market or to further develop them,
(21:50):
or they can't, even if they want it.
So we have, apart from thesetwo solutions, the ones that
I already described, right?
On one side, helping themfreely sharing what they have.
On the other side, the second optionis to help them with this bootcamp.
The third option is to help themmatching with eventually companies
(22:11):
that want to further develop whatthey have and bring that to market.
And we help in the matching process.
So basically what we realize is thatwe could create a space where companies
could come and we would showcase whatwe have in the site, because in fact,
What we have in our collection includesstuff that can be shared, freely shared
(22:36):
because our team of doctors went throughit and thought it was not dangerous.
And also the innovatoris willing to share.
Sometimes that's whatthey want to do, right?
Because many of these patients,they are not really interested
in making any money out of these.
What they want is to have othersuse what they did, et cetera.
But it's true that there is anothergroup of people that would like
(22:58):
to eventually benefit financially.
From what they have eventuallylicensed these to an existing company.
So we created this space where we showcase to those that, want to have a
look basically, and this is typicallycompanies, , met their companies.
(23:19):
Digital tech companies and we showthem what we have some of the things
that in fact are freely shared Butthen other things that somehow we
can't yet really share and the and whenthe patients are willing to allow us
to share with the potential buyers.
We do that.
(23:39):
And we have examples of products thatare now in the process of becoming,
available in the market that wereinitially developed by by patients.
In fact, we already have productslike these, sometimes best selling
products, Medtronic has a device.
(24:00):
For instance, this was, if we lookat the history and that's why the
work by Eric von Hippel is so rich,so important because basically he was
saying this a while ago and what werealize is that it's the way it works.
For instance, in this case, we knowthat the work that is now sometimes
(24:23):
being commercialized by some companieswas originally developed by patients.
This device by Medtronicis one of those cases.
We even know who the person was,in fact, , people know about this,
I talk about this case sometimes.
The power of users, the powerof patients is enormous.
(24:43):
I think it's even now much bigger thanit was before because of course there are
all these tools that can help the patientsto further develop what they have.
And that's what our mission is to.
Help these patients further developingthe solutions and increasing
the impact that these solutionscan have on everyone's life.
(25:09):
Pain for people of the worry about theip and how do i do this how do i find
this how do i find the right company etc
We have beautiful examples and there'sso so many more are gonna link in the
show notes to pedro's ted talks there'sarticles out there as well eric also
eric van hippel talks about pedro inhis work as well eric's also gonna come
(25:30):
back on the show and unpack some of thisand, link it into his own work as well.
Pedro for people who want to find out moreabout the platform who may be patients
or carers who have an idea themselves andthey want to bring it to you or bring to
the platform to find people, where can ifind the platform and find out your work
We are in different social media.
(25:51):
If they search for patient innovationof course they will find this.
They can find some of my colleaguesworking in universities in Portugal,
in Denmark, in Spain, in the US.
They can just get in touch.
I'm sure people will be happy to respondto questions and to provide the support.
(26:13):
And of course, we also keep invitingpeople , to help us spread the word.
On one side, we think that, 5, 000innovations, which is more or less
what we have in the site right nowis a lot, and it is a lot, right?
Innovation is rare, and having5, 000 medical devices or,
(26:34):
services that were self developedby patients is obviously a lot.
But we know that there is a lot more outthere because, of course, when someone
innovates for himself in his garage,in his kitchen, in his hospital bed,
that person has no incentive to share.
(26:55):
The main goal is to use.
So what we want is peopleto be able to share that.
So if you have heard of storieslike this, please share them with
us because of course we are alwaysgoing after those stories with the
goal of trying to further developthem if, if that makes sense at all.
(27:15):
And eventually sharing them so that wecan maximize the impact of all these user
innovations because we are talking abouthealthcare, we call patient innovations.
Founder and president of patientinnovation, pedro Oliviera
thank you for joining us.
Thank you, it was a real pleasure.
Another episode of this user innovationseries brought to you by friends at wazoku
(27:40):
pioneers of total innovation transforminghow organizations solve challenges drive
growth and deliver, measurable results.
As the world's only network innovationmarketplace wazoku connects people
ideas and technology to createscalable impactful innovation
you can discover, wazoku at www.
(28:01):
wazoku.
com.
Welcome to our new series inspiredby the work of Eric Von Hippel.
This series is sponsoredby our friends at Wazoku.
Wazoku are pioneers of total innovation,transforming how organizations solve
challenges, drive growth, and delivermeasurable results as the world's only
networked innovation marketplace, Wazokuconnects people, ideas, and technology
(00:23):
to create scalable, impactful innovation.
And you can find Wazoku at wazoku.
com.
In today's episode, we focus onfascinating research on user innovation
and more specifically on the role ofpatients, caregivers, in the development
of new medical products and services.
We are joined by the founder andpresident of patient innovation.
(00:47):
He has many, many decorations to his namethat I'm not going to go through today.
You can look them up online.
We welcome to the show.
Professor Pedro Oliveira.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
That was a very goodpronunciation, by the way.
So
I was practicing man.
I was practicing I wasforcing my practice on top
of Pedro off air beforehand.
(01:08):
And I got there in the end.
Great to have you with us,
It's very nice to be on your show.
Thank you for inviting me.
We have so much to share.
You have some amazing examplesof patient or caregiver.
user generated innovations but i thoughtwe'd start through the lens of what
we've done before with your frienderic von Hippel with the previous guest
(01:30):
on the show, and eric's main conceptof user innovation paradigm because
in a way it's like lenses through whichyou see your work, i thought what we
do is i throw up on the screen thediagram that we've covered eric before.
But i'd love your take on thatand then we'll take our audience
through some examples that you'vediscovered through your platform.
(01:53):
Again.
Thank you for so much forhaving me in your show.
As you just mentioned, the workof Eric von Hippel has been a
big influence on my own work.
His work is very influential anyway,he has created a big community of
people that actually work in this areaof open and user innovation and even
created a society that is entitledthe Open and User Innovation Society.
(02:17):
And what you see there is basically a goodsummary of some of the things that Eric
and some colleagues have, published about.
You see there that, in fact, Prior touser and open innovation, we had this
notion of producer innovation, whichis basically when companies develop
(02:37):
new products, new services withobjective of bringing them to market,
with objective of commercializing, ofmaking Profits out of those innovations.
And that's one of thearrows that you see there.
On top of that, you see the redarrow, which is the one that
represents user innovation.
(02:58):
And the goal here is that in fact,if you look at the, you know, there's
a timeline, right, quite often, infact, before producers bring new
products to Users did it already.
You know, they don't necessarilybring the products to markets because
(03:19):
that's not what motivates them.
But because users are motivated bythe fact that sometimes they have
strong needs and they need to fixthose needs, they end up, , developing
new devices, new solutions that theyeventually bring to market as well.
In fact, we were inspired by these.
And at some point in our research, westart looking at the field of healthcare.
(03:43):
We were very intrigued because we startfinding the patients that in some cases
actually managed to save their lives.
And this was obviously very powerful.
Let me give you an example.
I was very, very intrigued whenwe bump into Tal Golesworthy.
Tal Golesworthy is a guy from England.
(04:03):
He's an engineer that at somepoint was told by his doctor.
that due to his Marfan syndromecondition, so he's a Marfan syndrome
patient, he was at risk of dying.
And the risk here was that his waterwas at risk of having a rupture
and this eventually would kill him.
And the doctor was actually not very nicein terms of giving him, a good forecast.
(04:26):
He told him, look, we anticipate thatthis could even happen within 24 months.
Long story short, Tal went on thinkingabout his own problem and realized
that, wow, maybe I could come up with asolution because if I have a pipe, right?
Of course, I'm talking about his award,but for an engineer, it was just a
(04:48):
pipe, that is going to have a rupture.
I just don't wait for this to happen.
I try to do something about it.
And long story short, actually, there wasworth it managed to develop an awarding
support to put around his own award.
Well, not just to save hislife, but in fact, over 1000.
(05:10):
Patients have received the same awardingsupport that was developed by this guy.
And, we were inspired by peoplelike him or Louis Plante.
Louis Plante has a different situation.
Louis was sadly, he passed awayalready, was a cystic fibrosis patient.
Among many other complications.
(05:33):
These patients have these mucusthat accumulate in the lungs.
And part of the problem is thatthis can create infections that
sometimes actually kill the patients.
This is still a fatal disease.
And of course, we knew this very well.
We suffered a lot as a kid because hehad to do all the traditional treatments.
(05:58):
And by the way, he was lucky in a way.
Because for a long time, thelife expectancy for these
patients was five years.
Five years meaning, kidswould not grow into adulthood.
They would die on average age of five.
And , what was the solution?
Because there was this mucus thataccumulated in the lungs, What people
(06:22):
have, developed the solutions werethings like chest clapping, both in
the front and also in the, back to tryto remove the mucus from the lungs.
In fact, doctors, call it the socalled ketchup bottle principle.
I mean, think about this, right?
(06:44):
I mean, if we have ketchup andif we need to take it out, what
we do is that we clap it as well.
So that's what we did to kidsfor a long, long time, right?
Doing all this clapping and thenturning kids upside down, shaking
them so that the mucus would come out.
And of course this was not veryefficient as you can imagine.
(07:04):
So some patients, and I've talkedwith many, , would describe this as
excruciating because if you're doing allthese treatments was really bad, , Louis
had to do four hours of treatment perday, which basically means having his
mother, for instance, or his caregiver.
doing the chest clapping andsometimes his body was hurting
(07:26):
already because, they were ill.
. So this was reallydifficult for the patients.
And what happened one day toLouis was very intriguing to him.
One day he went to a concert andwhat happened in that concert
changed his life , it was classicalmusic and he was sitting there.
And of course, when you go to a concertthe expectation is that you remain silent,
(07:50):
but he couldn't , he was feeling veryuncomfortable during the concert, and
the music was causing this discomfort.
What was happening was that the vibrationsfrom the music were shaking , his lungs.
And of course this wascausing a lot of discomfort.
He was coughing most of the time, peoplearound him were giving him these weird
(08:14):
looks like, come on, it's a concert.
You should remain silent.
He didn't leave during this firsthalf of the concert and to everyone's
surprise during the break, he was fine.
So of course there was no music.
That was even worse, right?
Because the people aroundhim were really irritated.
You know, this was the guy thatwas coughing most of the time.
(08:34):
And now during the break, he was fine.
But the second part wasa different endement.
It was Shostakovich.
Boom, boom.
The music was A bit violent for him.
And in fact, he was sittingthere feeling very uncomfortable.
And at some point he had to leave theconcert and this crisis of spectoration
(08:54):
at the door of the concert hall, and wenthome afterwards thinking about it, right?
Why did it happen?
And he realized that of course itwas the vibration from the music.
And he went down thinking that.
Well, of course, in a concerthall, like he had experienced, this
was a bad thing, but maybe if hecould control it, this could work.
(09:16):
And he went home and startexperimenting with speakers.
So we would , use speakers that you wouldput in front of his lungs so that you
would get the vibrations from the musicand it could even control the music.
And it was very interestingbecause, I realized that it's
not really the music that works.
The best, the best would be boom, boom.
(09:37):
And of course it wasn't necessarilypleasant to listen to that.
He realized that if you couldremove the music and just leave
some strong vibrations, this wouldbe the best to clear the lungs.
, we plan to develop theFrequencer, which is a machine
that many of these patients use.
And when they want to clear the lungs,And I've seen patients doing this
(09:59):
in my own office, at some point,for instance, did, that with me.
He asked me if he could put the thingin front of his legs, which he did.
And for maybe 15, 20 minutes.
We were talking and I could hear hisvoice and of course there was a bit of
vibration in his voice because he wasgetting the vibration in the lungs.
But, afterwards he asked forthe toilets and I think he
(10:22):
obviously did his pectoration.
And he did the treatmentas he was there, to me.
And of course this was remarkablebecause it was again a solution
that was developed by a patient.
And I could go on because in fact,what we realized at some point was
that there were many patients likethis out there when I say many and,
(10:45):
you know, I'm sure there's even more.
It was very interesting because atsome point we realized that maybe we
could try to collect some of these.
And what we did was to develop an onlineplatform, and then we invited patient
innovators, as we call them, patientsthat actually develop innovative devices
for themselves, not necessarily withobjective of bringing them to market,
(11:09):
even if sometimes that's what's happening,that's what happens, but with objective
of using them in the very first place.
And, you know, we startgetting all sorts of solutions.
So we had to invite a team of medicaldoctors to help us in the assessment
of the solutions because we werealso getting a lot of crazy stuff.
(11:30):
But now we have a big portfolio ofsolutions like these that we share.
Sometimes we even help themto actually commercialize, the
solutions that bring them to market.
So among other things, what we didwas we actually started an award,
what we call the patient innovationaward . And this is something we
(11:53):
have done in Lisbon several times.
We also did it in Paris.
We did it in Copenhagen, in Denmark.
So the goal is to Invite peoplefrom all over the world to submit
what they have and see what are someof the most influential solutions
that these guys have developed.
And some of thesesolutions are remarkable.
(12:15):
And you know, what we do then is wecreated this award to of course,
recognize them for the impactthat I, that they are having.
Let me give you an example.
For instance this past year in2024, we did another edition of
our patient innovation award.
And one of the technologies thatgot an award is truly remarkable.
(12:41):
This is something that was developedin Denmark by a guy, his name is Hans.
Hans is.
almost blind.
It's not totally blind, but he cansee some light and that's about it.
Well, it's hard for us to evenunderstand how difficult it is.
(13:02):
The life of someone that doesn't see.
But of course, for someone with thiscondition things at home, simple
things like choosing what is the rightcan that you want to open, right?
You have a tomato juice and the soup andthe only one is the one that you want
to open and you have no clue which oneis the one that you are looking for.
(13:24):
And , because he wanted to be asindependent as possible, he at some
point start realizing that His camerain the iPhone could really help him
because with the camera he could doa video call and you know of course
I could do this with you, right?
If I needed help.
Look, I'm here trying to figure out whichone is the right can, can you help me?
(13:46):
And you tell me, hey Pedro, Ithink if you want the tomato
juice, go for the one at the right.
And I would say, Hey,okay, thank you so much.
That's really helpful.
And, of course, I mean Hans was doingthis , well, in the beginning with
some of his friends, and then he startsrealizing, well, poor people, right?
I'm always calling the same group ofpeople, and this could be much more
(14:07):
interesting if, in fact, On one side, if Icould find a pool of volunteers that could
help people that have these sort of needs.
And what he did was truly remarkablebecause in fact, he created
this app that people can use.
I use it a lot.
I'm opening it.
(14:27):
And as of now, as of, as we speak,in fact, there are over 8, 500, 000
volunteers in the website, in the appthat have helped more than 786, 000
people that are either blind or have lowvision or some sort of eye condition.
(14:49):
So of course that's millions of peoplehelping, almost a million people, right?
Or at different points, at leastthese people have asked for help.
But this is not the end of the story.
Think about it.
This guy is amazing by the way.
So as you can imagine, startinga new project, starting
a firm is extremely hard.
(15:11):
We can just imagine how hard it isfor someone that is almost blind.
He did it in Denmark and ofcourse he was very happy when he
realized that he had already morevolunteers than the population.
Of his country, which isagain, truly remarkable.
And then at some point you realize that,sometimes rather than calling a person,
(15:32):
which could be, of course, not the bestthing to do, if you are at home, your
house is very disorganized and , you don'tnecessarily want to call a person, right?
Maybe AI can help andthink about it, right?
AI can help because AI can clearlydescribe what's in front of me.
And the, what basically, so thisproject is called Be My Eyes.
(15:56):
And basically now, one option thatthe patients have is to, rather
than calling a person, of course,this is still there, this option.
There are still, as I just mentioned, over8 million people that are willing to help.
But AI can eventually help describingwhat these guys cannot see.
And some of the use cases,obviously you haven't seen them.
(16:20):
I really encourage you to have a lookbecause it's truly amazing what what
I've seen some blind people doing, forinstance, navigating in London, of
course, sightseeing speaking rightwhere AI is describing everything.
And at some point, for instanceone of these guys wants to get the
taxi and there's a lot of traffic.
(16:41):
And the AI, AI, AI.
The app that was developed for them byOpenAI is one of the best use cases that
I've seen, in fact, of OpenAI technology.
There's a lot of cars passing byand basically the app tells him,
look, if you want to get a taxi, Iwill tell you when you should hail.
(17:02):
And there's a, thisis a blind guy, right?
With a camera in frontof him with his phone.
But the phone tells him, please hail.
And the taxi stops in front of him.
But this is even not the end ofthe story, because if you think
about it, of course, for all ofus, it wouldn't make much sense.
If you want to see to, to use acell phone in front of us, right?
(17:25):
We have eyes.
And even if they cannot use them in thesame way that we do, they have eyes too.
What basically they realize isthat they could use glasses.
And now, Ray Ban has developed someglasses for them that have cameras, small
cameras in fact, that have also speakersthat tell them, it's again, AI, right?
(17:48):
They look very nice, in fact.
And as they navigate, in the streetsof any city or at home the technology
is describing them what is going on.
So the main point is, of course, AI ischanging everything, but what AI is also
doing for patient innovators, for userentrepreneurs, for, user innovators in
(18:11):
general, in particular in healthcareis, truly remarkable because all of us
now, of course, can have the help of thetechnology that can really change lives.
And what we have observedis that this is happening.
In fact, we have introduced AI models inour training and some of these patient
innovators, and this is truly remarkable.
(18:33):
How the solutions that we are nowgetting are so much better already.
Because of course, of courseit can help you and me.
So of course it can also help peoplethat have some sort of disadvantage
because there's something therethat is willing to help you.
That's what we are observing.
Incredible, incredible.
(18:53):
This all started out of curiosityby you and studying this work.
And then you built a platformand it's a, an organization.
Not a for profit organizationthat you essentially run, but
You enable, profitability by bringing in,it's a multi sided platform, so therefore.
Industry can get involved let's sharea little bit about that how it's multi
(19:16):
sided platform so who are the sides of the
Yeah.
Much of
so when we started, we were just focusingon freely sharing what we have, meaning,
you know, everything that we were findingor that people could actually submit to
the platform was freely shared online.
And still the majority of what we havein the site is being freely shared.
(19:41):
Then what we realized was that,sometimes the patient, The innovator
doesn't necessarily want to do that.
In some cases, for instance, theywanted to become entrepreneurs.
They wanted to be the ones thatwanted to further develop what
they have and bring that to market.
When we realized that, we createda second option for these patients.
(20:02):
So we created these, we were verylucky to start with, because we
got a grant from EIT ELF, whichis a large European organization.
It stands for European Institute ofTechnology, and then they work in
several areas, ELF is one of them.
And it's in fact a big consortium ofalmost 300 healthcare organizations.
(20:24):
And they gave us a bit of money to helpthese patients develop what they have.
, what we did was a bootcamp thatbasically brings some of these patient
innovators to Lisbon and then toBarcelona, to IESE in Barcelona.
So in Lisbon, they work withmy own school, Nova School of
Business and Economics, as wellas with the Nova Medical School.
(20:45):
Then they moved to Barcelona wherethey will focus more on issues
of business plan development.
They work at the IESEBusiness School in Spain.
And finally, they go to CopenhagenBusiness School in Copenhagen in Denmark.
In this program, we help themfurther develop what they have.
(21:06):
First, we select them,people have to apply.
We select them, we then fund them, theyget a small grant to travel to these
places, etc. The program is free.
And this is for those that want toactually further develop what they have
and bring what they have to market.
(21:27):
As you can imagine, this isnot always possible, right?
We are talking about a very unusualtype of entrepreneur, right?
We are talking about patients.
And of course, sometimes, these patientsare afflicted with serious diseases and
it's not their priority to bring solutionsto market or to further develop them,
(21:50):
or they can't, even if they want it.
So we have, apart from thesetwo solutions, the ones that
I already described, right?
On one side, helping themfreely sharing what they have.
On the other side, the second optionis to help them with this bootcamp.
The third option is to help themmatching with eventually companies
(22:11):
that want to further develop whatthey have and bring that to market.
And we help in the matching process.
So basically what we realize is thatwe could create a space where companies
could come and we would showcase whatwe have in the site, because in fact,
What we have in our collection includesstuff that can be shared, freely shared
(22:36):
because our team of doctors went throughit and thought it was not dangerous.
And also the innovatoris willing to share.
Sometimes that's whatthey want to do, right?
Because many of these patients,they are not really interested
in making any money out of these.
What they want is to have othersuse what they did, et cetera.
But it's true that there is anothergroup of people that would like
(22:58):
to eventually benefit financially.
From what they have eventuallylicensed these to an existing company.
So we created this space where we showcase to those that, want to have a
look basically, and this is typicallycompanies, , met their companies.
(23:19):
Digital tech companies and we showthem what we have some of the things
that in fact are freely shared Butthen other things that somehow we
can't yet really share and the and whenthe patients are willing to allow us
to share with the potential buyers.
We do that.
(23:39):
And we have examples of products thatare now in the process of becoming,
available in the market that wereinitially developed by by patients.
In fact, we already have productslike these, sometimes best selling
products, Medtronic has a device.
(24:00):
For instance, this was, if we lookat the history and that's why the
work by Eric von Hippel is so rich,so important because basically he was
saying this a while ago and what werealize is that it's the way it works.
For instance, in this case, we knowthat the work that is now sometimes
(24:23):
being commercialized by some companieswas originally developed by patients.
This device by Medtronicis one of those cases.
We even know who the person was,in fact, , people know about this,
I talk about this case sometimes.
The power of users, the powerof patients is enormous.
(24:43):
I think it's even now much bigger thanit was before because of course there are
all these tools that can help the patientsto further develop what they have.
And that's what our mission is to.
Help these patients further developingthe solutions and increasing
the impact that these solutionscan have on everyone's life.
(25:09):
Pain for people of the worry about theip and how do i do this how do i find
this how do i find the right company etc
We have beautiful examples and there'sso so many more are gonna link in the
show notes to pedro's ted talks there'sarticles out there as well eric also
eric van hippel talks about pedro inhis work as well eric's also gonna come
(25:30):
back on the show and unpack some of thisand, link it into his own work as well.
Pedro for people who want to find out moreabout the platform who may be patients
or carers who have an idea themselves andthey want to bring it to you or bring to
the platform to find people, where can ifind the platform and find out your work
We are in different social media.
(25:51):
If they search for patient innovationof course they will find this.
They can find some of my colleaguesworking in universities in Portugal,
in Denmark, in Spain, in the US.
They can just get in touch.
I'm sure people will be happy to respondto questions and to provide the support.
(26:13):
And of course, we also keep invitingpeople , to help us spread the word.
On one side, we think that, 5, 000innovations, which is more or less
what we have in the site right nowis a lot, and it is a lot, right?
Innovation is rare, and having5, 000 medical devices or,
(26:34):
services that were self developedby patients is obviously a lot.
But we know that there is a lot more outthere because, of course, when someone
innovates for himself in his garage,in his kitchen, in his hospital bed,
that person has no incentive to share.
(26:55):
The main goal is to use.
So what we want is peopleto be able to share that.
So if you have heard of storieslike this, please share them with
us because of course we are alwaysgoing after those stories with the
goal of trying to further developthem if, if that makes sense at all.
(27:15):
And eventually sharing them so that wecan maximize the impact of all these user
innovations because we are talking abouthealthcare, we call patient innovations.
Founder and president of patientinnovation, pedro Oliviera
thank you for joining us.
Thank you, it was a real pleasure.
Another episode of this user innovationseries brought to you by friends at wazoku
(27:40):
pioneers of total innovation transforminghow organizations solve challenges drive
growth and deliver, measurable results.
As the world's only network innovationmarketplace wazoku connects people
ideas and technology to createscalable impactful innovation
you can discover, wazoku at www.
(28:01):
wazoku.
com.
Popular Podcasts
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com