An award-winning health technology entrepreneur has spoken of the “awe-inspiring” feeling that came with winning a government-backed grant for innovative women.

Jo Barrow, from Bethnal Green, is CEO and Co-founder of the health technology company Jitai Health, which trades as Curb.

Barrow, 31, is one of fifty women to receive this years Women in Innovation Award from Innovate UK, part of government body UK Research and Innovation. The award coincides with International Women’s Day, March 8.

The award recognises the work of Barrow on Curb, an app designed for recovery and prevention in treating addictive or harmful behaviour. Curb uses environmental data, as well as AI and machine learning, to predict and interrupt moments of craving.

“When you look at the standard of the other women in the cohort it’s sort of awe inspiring to see so many fantastic female entrepreneurs, and that I’ve been awarded alongside them” Barrow told Eastlondonlines.

Barrow founded Curb in 2021 after meeting her two co-founders, consultant psychiatrist and addiction specialist Dr David McLachlan and machine learning engineer Essam Nabil.

Barrow said: “We’re really united by a passion to increase equal access to healthcare, and the way we were approaching the problem was ‘what are the barriers to healthcare?’ It’s really the expense and scarcity of the human resources”.

She continued: “This entirely digital intervention, which is what Curb is, was our solution to that, focusing on an area of care that doesn’t have much attention right now, which is preventative healthcare. [This] is where we can see we have this massive outsize effect on people”.

Curb, Barrow explained, was designed to make preventative behaviour adjustment more accessible and immediate for patients. Development currently focuses on treating problematic alcohol use, but there are plans to expand the app’s scope.

Curb’s website states: “It’s not just for smoking, or alcohol – but vaping, gambling, steroids, gaming, sex and love addiction, skin picking – any behaviour you might want to stop”.

“We’re using AI to recognise each person’s individual profile around behaviour around addiction and craving, and then deliver ‘just-in-time adaptive interventions’ in situations that could lead to lapse” said Barrow.

She continues: “If you are quitting smoking, for example, and the app had analysed your patient inputs over the last couple of days, maybe some wearable data, data from your phone such as GPS location or screentime, it helps you recognise that coffee, for example, is a trigger. When you walk in to a coffee shop we’d send a notification… to take a moment, to reinforce your motivation”.

The app currently uses wearable technology to monitor patients, and is seeking participants in further research.

“We ran a small pilot in December” said Barrow. “Of the people who completed the pilot, which was around 70% of the participants, 90% met their drinking goals and attributed the app to their success, and 93% would recommend us to their family and friends”.

Barrow studied English Literature at the University of York, where she also edited the student newspaper, ‘York Vision’. Though not from a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) background, Barrow developed a passion for engaging digital products during her time as a journalist, writing “viral” content for Buzzfeed.

She left journalism to work for a tech startup: “As an early employee [I] got a sense of what it was like to grow a company from something that was very, very small to something quite large”.

As of 2019 less than a fourth of the UK’s STEM workforce were women. Barrow says women face unique challenges in the male-dominated tech field.

Barrow said: “I think that the challenges that women face are so insidious, that come from growing up as a woman and not knowing how to ask for things. Asking for things is such a huge part of tech and entrepreneurialism that building up the confidence to be able to do that is one of the hardest things I’ve had to learn”.

She continued: “Because people are aware of these insidious barriers, there is a lot of positivity and welcoming, and a lot of positive outreach in programs like Innovate UK or VCs [Venture Capital] that do specific outreaches for female founders. Playfair do a fantastic female founders’ open office hours every quarter”.

In several studies, AI has been found to carry the biases of those who create it. Barrow said: “It’s so critically important that we’re involved in AI, not just women but a huge diversity of people, perspectives, and opinions… there’s so much that has gone wrong in the history of technology that has gone wrong because different people or population groups have been ignored”.

Barrow went on to praise the entrepreneurs working to fill what she called “the femtech healthcare gap” but hopes to see more women in leadership positions. She said: “On the sort of operational level there are so many women in healthcare, in terms of providing the actual care itself, but in leadership [and] in leadership in health technology companies, that voice and that presence just isn’t there”.

Barrow said that though there are still “dinosaurs to contend with”, the outlook is positive.

The Women in Innovation Award includes £50,000 in government funding, business coaching and mentoring, and access to networking events.

The money, Barrow says, is going towards achieving regulatory compliance to ensure the product meets a high standard, and to better the company’s chances of working with the NHS.

Innovate UK have organised the Women in Innovation Awards yearly since 2016, this year providing a total of £2m in funding to recipients.