Questions and Answers

Our project, Arachne, is intended for physical therapists, and the visually impaired physical therapist in the first place.

We hope this could help solve problems with high uneployment of visually impaired people around Europe (75%), to help and support visually impaired physical therapists to broaden their knowledges and create circumnutates for growing quality of their life.

We believe, that our project could help visually impaired people to considered theirselves valuable members of mainstream society.

Arachne project is open to all visually impaired people and people with other disabilities to participate, as users and creators.

The technologies to be used in the project are as follows:

• Oracle Cloud
• Oracle Relational Database Management System and SQL Language
• Technologies of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and Deep Learning, i.e Python with added PyTorch/TensorFlow modules and modules for Data Science
• Web/Internet technologies, i.e. Oracle APEX, HTML/Java Script and a scripting language suitable for communication between the database, the Machine Learning Model and a web-browser

We assume that the application will run on mobile devices, i.e. smart phones, tablets, laptops.

We want the application to be accurate enough in determining the diagnosis and easy to use for the sighted physical therapists as well as for the visually impaired ones. And therefore to convince the therapists that the application is helpful and worth using. These are the general objectives.

More precisely:

firstly we want to the application to be tested by a few dozens of visually impaired and sighted physical therapists to evaluate its usability and capabilities in order to gain valuable user research.

The number of researchers can be limited, e.g. by using a specific language version.

If the results are satisfactory, we will deliver the application in english and any other language versions that will be available..

We will then able to track the number of users and the way they use the application.

We would like to reach several thousands of users, and a corresponding number of their clients, the people with problems with musculoskeletal system.

As mentioned above, we would like see several thousands of visually impaired physical therapists using the application to increase the quality and value of their work. Therefore we hope that their internal satisfaction with work and life will also increase..

We also want the application to be a help in identifying the problems of clients and maximizing the benefits of therapy with its right focus. As a result it can contribute to solving problems of musculoskeletal disorders, which can reduce the quality of life of affected people in every possible way: financial, social, medical.

Because the application wil run on a cloud machine and every usage will be recorded, it is very easy to track the number of users, clients' disorders identified and the success rate of the identification and therapy.

Our project can have an impact on several groups of people.

The primary users of the applications should be visually impaired physical therapists. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find out how many visually impaired people work as the therapists.

We can take in account of users also sighted physical therapists.

The secondary users of the application Arachne will be people with musculoskeletal disorders. According to the EU statistics, about 60% of working population in Europe has problems of the type

Therefore we can infer how many people could potentially use the application either as primary or secondary users and thus how many people can be affected. It is much more than 10 thousand people.

It is estimated that there are more than 30 million blind and partially sighted persons in geographical Europe. The figure comes from WHO 2010 material and the proportion of the blind people in population is certainly not decreasing. World wide this number reaches 245 million persons.

If we take into account proportion of therapists within visually impaired people in the Czech and Slovak republic, which is roughly between 10 and 20 percents, we have between 3 and 6 million visually impaired physical therapist in Europe.

This calculation also confirms that our project will impact at least 10 thousands people.

The project is intended to be scalable and extensible from the outset.. It is build as a modular and a cloud based solution.

This approach allows the scalability of the project as the number of users increases over time due to the easy scalability of the cloud.

The modularity of the solution allows it to be used for the diagnostics of diseases from other fields of medicine just by changing the Ml Model.

It is possible to use another type of input, i.e. to use another type of data, e.g. in case of musculoskeletal diseases, the photos or videos of patients' posture or movement can be used. This approach allows, for example application to be used to predict ' prospects of athletes in professional sports.

Our market will be initially the EU, which represents approximately 30 million blind and partially sighted people, representing up to 6 million therapists.

The application will definitely need to be localised. Localisation into English and Spanish language will create a bridge to enter global markets.

No.

Yes.

Yes. All our project documents are in english and the project is developed in english.

This is only because we are planning to expand abroad and therefore we are able to immediately cooperate with any partner abroad .

See also question 6.

Arachnet Project can be described as of type Artificial Intelligence for Medical Diagnostics. There are a lot of project or applications of the same type. On the other hand our project has special features that makes it different.

The majority of the similar applications uses some kind of automated data input, i.e. outputs from imaging medical devices or sensors.

Our application is design to require active user contribution. This solution requires finding out appropriate methods to correctly identify the input, i.e. client's disorder syndroms. This needs innovative mathematical and medical methods.

Our project deals with musculoskeletal system and its disorders an underappreciated area of medicine, despite the high prevalence of these problems.

And finally the application and the entire project is primarily aimed at visually impaired people, which requires thourough investigation in order to properly transform visual information to these suitable for people with visual impairements.

All of these makes the project challenging but also innovative and interesting for users as well as for the developers.

As stated above the project has some special features. in terms of data input, way of use, target user group and the area of medicine it is focused on.

Probably that is the reason why we did not find any similar project although the basic principle diagnosis identification using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning is widely used.

As previously stated there are several social groups directly targeted by the application:

• visually impaired people, i.e. The group of visually impaired therapists.
• peoples struggling with musculoskeletal disorders

The benefits that the application can bring to these social groups are namely:

• improvement of financial and mental state of visually impaired therapists
• improvement of physical and mental state of people with musculoskeletal disorders

All this can have an indirect impact on society as a whole.

If the application will prove its usefulness and reliability it can be helpful also in professional health-care.

We are at the beginning of the project.

We plan to gradually build our internal structure to be able to meet all objectives of the project.

We think that even in its current state our team is well build. There are people in the team with experience of many areas related to the focus of the project.

The communication between project members is well set up.

The experience of our project team:

Mr. Mura is visually impaired himself so he can evaluate a lot of things from his own experience. He has also worked as a physical therapists, which brings also a lot of valuable knowledge to the project.

Mr. Corba has been involved in several projects targeting people with disabilities and is therefore familiar with many of the circumstances that occor in these type of projects. He has more than 20 years of experience in Project management (using PMP structure) and financial support.

Ms Koropecka manages a massage studio in which visually impaired physical therapists works and that is why she has detailed knowledge of the needs of the therapists as well as of the clients of the studio.

If we quantify the value of the project up to now so far we have invested at least 10,000 euros of highly skilled labor.

At this stage of the project life cycle we consider a combinationn of multiple sources of funding to be an appropriate way of financial support, i.e. equity capital, vyrious funds, such as . Oracle Global fund with which we are in intensive communication, Vodafone fund and others.

We are Definitely still working on obtaining further funding of EU funds suchas Erasmus+ Programme, which is likely to launch a call for applications in October 2023.

In the next phase we would like to address angel funds or other early stage investors. We continue to reach out to private investors, who focus on start-ups and new technologies.

As for the operation and functional expansion of the project after we will complete the application development it is dependent on a spread of the application among the therapists and its usefulness.

Running the application will cost up to a few hundred euros per year, which includes Cloud on which the application will run and possible technival support.

If the application will work properly and with the satisfactory accuracy we anticipate that there will be no problem obtaining financial support to further development.

Also, other modalities of usage could be found and thus the financial sources could be found as well, depending on the specific use case.

The project is to be apply some new features, that have not been yet explored or developed or at least we have not found the sources that describes the solutions we are going to use.

This is one of the reasons why we plan and we already started to collaborate with suitable Universities on research tasks.

Since we do not have any experienced medical expert in our team we tried to reach out the medical institution in Czech and Slovak republic. Thanks to this efforts we will present our project in Rehabilitation clinics of the 1st Faculty of Medicine of Charles University and University hospital (VFN) in Prague.

the head of the Clinic (Ms. Angerova) and chief of Departement of physiotherapy (Mr Jenicek) found our project interesting and have expressed interest to participate in it.

We are already working with Oracle Corporation in our research efforts, the Oracle Company has rated the focus and principles of the project quite highly and therefore supplies us with its Cloud for free of charge.

We are still in contact with Prague affiliate (Mr Nemec) and the European headquarters in Reading, UK (Mr Pitts).