I’m Valentin Kauth. I live in Berlin and want to enable healthcare access for everyone through digitalization.

Born into a family of pediatricians the idea of spending my future in healthcare (or maybe even trying to become a medical doctor) was always stuck in my head. But growing up in a time with innovations such as the MP3 player, the iPhone or music streaming, I just couldn´t get my head around not being part of this fascinating world of technology. That´s why my path to become a techie was already paved at a young age.

So no suprise that I started my educational career at Stuttgarts Hochschule der Medien, spending almost 4 years learning a ton about software development and how to turn an idea into a releasable product; but especially about user-centric design as well as intuitive and accessible user interfaces. My high interested in IoT devices brought me to Stuttgart based Start-Up Codeatelier and even to the Hogheschool van Amsterdam, spending an exchange semester working on connected surveillance devices and DataViz.

The real focus on healthcare related topics happened through my thesis, where I built a prototype remote heart rate detector using a simple webcam and the principle of plethysmography (you might know this principle from pulse oximetry). So I decided to continue this journey and started my masters degree in Medical Informatics at the University of Tübingen, with a short stop at the University of Oslo (big shoutout). Diving into topics such as ML models for disease detection, algorithms used for genome sequencing and assembly or computational photography - it was truly fascinating. But I missed one thing: Conceptualizing and building applications that will be given directly into the hands of patiens and doctors.

This is why my next step led me to the Fraunhofer Institutewhere I built a chatbot supporting people in a prevention and health education program and worked on various other amazing projects, even ending up in two publications. Taking a break from research and stepping into the free economy, I spent the next 1 1/2 years at Hamburg based elbstack, where I completely conceptualized and led the development of the geriatric care software DokuCoach from scratch until release. The time at elbstack was amazing and made me grow enormously as a developer, but I felt like it was time to start a new adventure after releasing the DokuCoach software.

So today, I´m one of the Co-Founders of Digital Rheuma Lab, where we´re developing applications that support patients affected by rheumatism to regain control of their disease through health education, lifestyle intervention and disease surveillance - getting one step closer towards enabling low-trehsold health care access for everyone.