OREANDA-NEWS. July 20, 2012. RINTECH, part of the AiTi group of companies, signed an inverstment agreement with the Life Button project that specializes on life alert systems (“medical alarm”) for elderly and disabled people. Under the agreement RINTECH’s investment volume will make up more than 35 million rubles. Above all, those means will be spent on infrastructure development, R&D, work on creation of the project’s own equipment and on distribution channels expansion.

The Life Button project was established in November 2010 by Dmitry Yurchenko and Irina Linnik, SKOLKOVO full-time MBA programme graduates. From the moment of its appearance the project was the resident of business-incubator of Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO.

The service essence is as follows: a user is provided with gadget equipped with a button. Pressing the button provokes a signal meaning that a person needs help. Services of that, still unique for Russia, project are now meant for elderly and disabled people, patients with chronic diseases only. However the project team plans to design product for children as well.

 “Our interest in that project is not a coincidence. Several years ago we at the AiTi groups of companies thought about the launch of such a service. Back then, after market research and discussions with the medical community the decision was made not to develop that direction. And what a surprise it was as we found out about the start of such a project. Sure, lately technologies have made great progress, but still the “ignorance is power” principle might have worked as well, guys just didn’t have an idea about the problems we had been taking into consideration. They appeared on the market and have shown a result good enough to believe in their future success, - Sergei Kuptsov, CEO of the company, said. – I believe that the deal has an obvious synergetic effect. Years of work let RINTECH store deep expertise in the method of medical information systems construction for the corporate sector. It will contribute to structure the Life Button technology which can be applied not only on the mass market but in state and corporate sectors as well. On the other hand, it is a way for RINTECH to appear on the mass market where we have not been represented yet”.

“RINTECH comprises the technological expertise, knowledge of health care industry peculiarities and has tight bonds on that market, - Dmitry Yurchenko, head of the Life Button project said. – We are grateful to the AiTi group of companies for their trust. Before we have had only two reasons to be proud: we had managed to save several lives and survive ourselves. Now there are at least two more: we can be proud of involvement in a big “IT-family” and of attraction of the first million dollars for a socially important deed”.

“While studying at the SKOLKOVO business school we planned to build a leader of the mobile medicine market in the CIS – a high-technology company of the world level that would increase quality and span of life, - Irina Linnik, development director, the Life Button project, comments. – Initially, our project was considered to be a platform for the launch of new products. Today we dive deep into the remote monitoring of a person’s health state, study the opportunity of the neural net application for analysis of indications gathered distantly and their probable integration into the federal medical archives system. And here resources of RINTECH’s, a leader on the market, will really be helpful”.

Despite being a young project Life Button has already won the number of entrepreneurial contests, such as: BIT, “Telecom Idea”, “Business-Success”, “Startup of the year”. The project founders are included in the top-10 of the most perspective entrepreneurial teams according to the PRUFFI agency’s ranking. Life Button is also one of three brightest startups of 2011 according to Forbes.