Elinar, founded by Elina Juntunen and Ari Juntunen in 1994, has grown into a company of nearly 30 employees. Elinar provides artificial intelligence solutions that help companies grow their business and enhance their content management solutions.
“Elinar has been developing its own artificial intelligence, ElinarAI, which understands the text. Any text can be used to form a kind of information structure, which can then be used to support decision-making or business process automation,” says Ari Juntunen. Elinar is an expert in unstructured data. In practice, this means that Elinar’s artificial intelligence understands unstructured data, such as text written by humans, medical reports, or invoices, for example. “Our artificial intelligence has been developed for automating unstructured document processes. These automated processes create cost savings when people do not have to do the mechanical work and are only involved in the decision-making,” says Ari Juntunen.
Elinar differs from other AI companies in that it makes ElinarAI available to its partners. Elinar’s partners are able to integrate the artificial intelligence into their own products: the companies can add the advanced AI features to their own selection within a few weeks. The Swedish company Aigine is a good example. Their product scans all unstructured documents and identifies those that contain personal data, that is, data subject to the GDPR. Artificial intelligence identifies the GDPR’s lawful basis for storing personal data and suggests how it should be retained. “We have developed the solution for Aigine. They are responsible for selling the service to the world and for commercializing the product,” says Ari Juntunen. “ElinarAI is a generic artificial intelligence that caters to the needs of various fields. Now we need people who understand the challenges their business faces and want to utilize artificial intelligence to make their business more efficient.”
Ari Juntunen says that their artificial intelligence is based on supervised learning. This means the formation of pairs, such as an invoice, from which things relevant to the business process are picked up. This material can very well be used as training material. “For example, our customers may have invoice records from a period spanning 10 years, which can be used as training material. This way, we can create training data without people having to do anything,” says Ari. However, one challenge is, for example, health-based material that the customer needs to produce in order for the data to be suitable to be used as training material. “We hope to find a solution for enhancing data collection through gamification. Gamification could motivate people to produce data, encourage them to participate – and even compete with others to produce even better data,” says Ari Juntunen. Elinar also offers training related to artificial intelligence, which can be implemented using the customer’s own data.
AI solutions have become central to improving the efficiency of day-to-day operations in the social and health care sector
The social and health care sector has already recognized the benefits of using large data sets. For example, various indicators for collecting different types of data have already been developed and deployed in elderly homecare. These indicators can be used, for example, to find out how often the elderly open a refrigerator door, or how they move around their homes. Elderly people are subject to various interventions which are aimed to increase their ability to function and thus improve their ability to live independently.
Currently, there is no set of indicators that could be used to combine data on the functional capacity of the elderly and data on the interventions and the subjective observations of homecare professionals aimed at supporting the wellbeing and independent living of the elderly. The aim would be to develop a data-based service that could help understand which interventions truly benefit the individual. This could be widely scaled to the global market for elderly homecare services. Homecare professionals collect information on the daily activities of the elderly, for example: “Today the patient did not remember to get dressed and was still wearing a nightgown in the evening”, or “The refrigerator contains spoiled food”. Homecare professionals record these types of observations on a daily basis, and these lead to small and large interventions to promote the wellbeing of the elderly. However, the real impact of these interventions is still unknown. Better data could help improve the planning of individual care and thus the money invested could be better used for increasing the wellbeing of the elderly and for helping them live longer in their homes. This would also generate savings for society. The aim is to find a uniform solution for homecare record-keeping and at the same, ensure the high quality of data by motivating homecare professionals through the gamification of data collection.
“We should be able to find coherent data from this material produced by humans to use as training material for artificial intelligence,” explains Ari Juntunen. He believes that gamification has the potential to motivate and engage homecare professionals to write richer material on the daily activities of the elderly, which would also mean high-quality data for artificial intelligence. Ari Juntunen believes that the Gamecoast network is able to provide solutions for the production of training data. “If we want large groups to get excited, learn and commit to their work, gamification provides a good way to get the personnel involved. People would produce new training material for artificial intelligence, and at the same time, gamification could be used to create competition between people, which would encourage them to produce better data. In addition, collecting points and improving one’s status in a community – and for example getting bonuses by doing so – would also be important,” says Ari Juntunen.
Elinar aims to be among the best in the world with its own AI application.
Elinar’s vision is to become one of the leading companies in its narrow field with its own AI application that helps companies improve their business processes and automate their content management data. Elinar currently has a turnover of 4 million euros and aims to increase it to 20 million euros within the next five years. Ari Juntunen finally concludes: “Gamify your AI – that’s our thing!”
Writer Pirita Ihamäki and translation Lingo