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Orbital Global wins Innovation of the Year at prestigious healthcare awards

Taunton-based Orbital Global is proud to have won the highly coveted ‘Innovation of the Year’ award at the OTCToolbox Consumer Healthcare Industry (CHi) Awards 2021. This accolade honours the best consumer healthcare product innovation in 2020 and was presented to Orbital Global for its artificial intelligence digital assistant, VirtTuri®.

The result of four years’ development work, with the assistance of the University of Essex and Cardiff University, VirtTuri is designed for use on a brand’s website, app, or social media. It has been initially trained to address a range of frequently asked questions involving a particular ailment, the product’s patient information leaflet, and immediate actions for the patient. Via machine learning, its accuracy improves with every use.

Judges were also impressed by its ability to manage pharmacovigilance and report adverse-events and highlighted that it uses innovative science to drive better outcomes for consumers and patients.

Assessed by a panel of 11 consumer healthcare experts, VirtTuri was described as:

  • ‘A process which makes a step change and embodies a fundamental change. It does this in a technological way to help improve consumer outcomes.’
  • ‘A real innovation for the OTC industry’, which allows ‘permanent interaction with the respective patients on a high-quality level at the same time as integrating the pharmacovigilance needs.’
  • ‘A step forward for website usage in the OTC industry’  
  • ‘In tune with the pandemic times’ in a ‘world where online virtual chat functions are becoming increasingly necessary due to restrictions on personal interaction and also becoming more widely accepted by consumers.’

Hayden Allen-Vercoe (pictured), chief operating officer at Orbital Global, said: “We are extremely proud of VirtTuri and know it performs brilliantly well, having already been adopted and rigorously tested by leading consumer healthcare brands, Sudocrem and Infacol. The technology is now ready for extensive rollout to the consumer healthcare industry, which is hugely exciting.

“Artificial intelligence is one of the most important technologies of the 21st Century. It is already impacting our daily lives and will continue to do so in the future. With this in mind, we are constantly innovating and plan to enhance VirtTuri even further, with the development of a patented visual avatar component later this year.”

VirtTuri was showcased at the inaugurual AI Festival earlier this year.

The OTCToolbox CHi awards recognise the best in business development and innovation around the world.

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