TAL OR

health

Israeli startup wins
first Henry Ford
artificial intelligence
challenge.

Health

Innovations

ABOVE: This diagram shows movement measured by the phone app and sent to a physician.
TOP: Levi Shapiro, founder MHealth Israel, a nonprofit that assists health-related start-ups; Dr. Scott
Dulchavsky, CEO, Henry Ford Innovation Institute; Ziv Yekutieli, CEO, Montfort; and Dima Gershman, CTO, Montfort.

SHARI S. COHEN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

M

ontfort, an Israeli
startup company spe-
cializing in neurologi-
cal disorders, has been chosen
as the first winner of Henry
Ford Health System’s Artificial
Intelligence (AI) Challenge.
Montfort has developed a
way to use smartphones to
measure, record and analyze
data from patients with certain
neurological disorders such as
Parkinson’s disease and tremors.
The AI Challenge began
last year as part of Henry Ford
Innovation’s Global Technology
Development Program, funded
through a grant from the
William Davidson Foundation.
“Henry Ford has long been an
international leader in neurosci-
ences research and treatment
and that makes Montfort a great
fit for this challenge,” said Scott
Dulchavsky, M.D., Ph.D., CEO
of the Henry Ford Innovation
Institute (see sidebar on next
page) and chairman of surgery
and surgeon-in-chief at Henry
Ford Hospital.
Dulchavsky added there were
10 finalists among approximate-

ly 50 applicants for the $75,000
challenge grant.
“We wanted a startup that
had raised less than $10 mil-
lion, was willing to work with
our staff and had something
scalable that our health sys-
tem could use right away,” he
explained.
Montfort co-founder and CEO
Ziv Yekutieli is an electrical engi-
neer who has worked in Israeli
high-tech startups for 15 years.
“The first time I faced the
impact of neurological disor-
ders was when my legendary
high school math teacher, Yair
Cohen, was diagnosed with ALS.
I have met him several times
during his last years, witness-
ing the sad decline of a brilliant,
humorous and adventurous
person I admired. Yair’s life has
strengthened my inclination
toward engineering; his death
got me interested in neuro-
physiology. Contemplating
between the two, I ended up
studying both, believing that
many patients can be helped by
linking these two disciplines,”
Yekutieli said.

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February 22 • 2018

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