"Extra Horizon offers best-in-class medical cloud solutions through their deeply proven expertise in medical cloud. The company's professional expertise in developing customized solutions, leveraging an extensive backbone knowledge, makes it an ideal partner for this important undertaking."
ams AG (now ams OSRAM) is a global leader in the design and manufacture of advanced sensor solutions. The company’s mission is to shape the world through sensor solutions — providing a seamless interface between humans and technology. With headquarters in Austria and operations across more than 30 countries, ams employs around 9,000 people and serves more than 8,000 customers worldwide.
Their high-performance sensor ICs, optical sensors, and spectral sensing technology serve consumer, communications, industrial, and medical markets. In the context of digital diagnostics, ams developed a spectral sensor platform capable of delivering lab-quality accuracy at the point of care — without clinical infrastructure.
The challenge
The COVID-19 pandemic underlined the critical importance of highly accurate, secure rapid testing at scale. Fast and reliable diagnostic data was essential not only for individual patient management, but for governments and health authorities developing and managing public health responses.
Lateral flow tests offered a low-cost, rapid means of detection — but reading results manually introduced human error, and test data remained siloed and inaccessible for population-level analysis. What was needed was a way to digitise the read-out, transmit results instantly and securely, and process millions of tests in real time across wide geographic regions — all while meeting strict data privacy regulations like GDPR.
ams had developed a spectral sensor-based LFT read-out solution that delivered highly reliable antigen or antibody results in around 15 minutes, without the need for lab infrastructure. The missing piece was a compliant, scalable, medical-grade cloud backend to connect the hardware to patients and health authorities.
Why Extra Horizon
ams selected Extra Horizon to power the cloud layer of their connected point-of-care testing solution. Extra Horizon’s Medical Backend-as-a-Service provided:
- Instant results to smartphones — test outcomes delivered securely within seconds of the sensor completing its read-out, directly to the patient’s device
- Real-time processing at scale — the platform was built to handle up to millions of test results concurrently, reliably, across wide geographic regions
- Full GDPR compliance out of the box — sensitive patient data processed in line with EU data protection regulations without requiring bespoke compliance work from ams
- Medical-grade reliability — Extra Horizon’s pre-certified infrastructure met the strict requirements applicable to IVD data handling
- Speed to deployment — Extra Horizon’s proven backbone allowed ams to go from sensor hardware to a fully connected, compliant cloud solution in weeks rather than months
The partnership also directly enabled a second deployment: a full production line for SARS-CoV-2 antibody digital rapid tests was inaugurated with Germany-based Senova, combining ams’s spectral sensor hardware with Extra Horizon’s cloud infrastructure to deliver a complete end-to-end digital diagnostic solution.
The result
The ams and Extra Horizon partnership demonstrated how hardware sensor innovation and medical cloud infrastructure can be rapidly combined to respond to a global health crisis.
- ~15 minutes from test to result, delivered securely to smartphone
- Millions of tests processed in real time across multiple geographies
- Full GDPR compliance across all deployment regions
- Production-ready in weeks — significantly faster than building compliant cloud infrastructure from scratch
- Second deployment enabled with Senova for SARS-CoV-2 antibody digital rapid tests