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Technologická Inkubace

Fonafix wins CzechInvest competition: speeds up the work of speech therapists and improves the lives of people with dysarthria

TECH4LIFE
15.11. 2025
line-arrow Fonafix wins CzechInvest competition: speeds up the work of speech therapists and improves the lives of people with dysarthria

Dysarthria is a complex speech disorder that causes difficulties with articulation, voice, breathing and prosody. It is most commonly caused by strokes, accidents or tumours in the head and neck region, but can also result from various neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy or Parkinson’s disease. It occurs in both children and adults and affects more than 50 million people worldwide each year, including around 80 000 in the Czech Republic.

The article was taken from hn.cz.

Patients who want to return to normal functioning, communicate with loved ones and regain their identity as soon as possible are now being helped by the Fonafix digital system. Its development is the work of Ján Mucha, Zoltán Galáž and Jiří Mekyska from the startup Scicake, whose multidisciplinary team has been working on the use of modern information technology and artificial intelligence in healthcare for many years.

This innovation has now earned Scicake a win in the Technology Incubation Demoday 2025 competition, where specialists from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications (FEKT) of Brno University of Technology (BUT) have not only received recognition from the professional community, but also important support for further growth. The competition was organised by Technological Incubation, the largest Czech initiative to date aimed at the development of innovative young companies from the CzechInvest agency. The project has already successfully supported 250 domestic startups and due to the great interest, it is about to be expanded. Therefore , a seventh challenge will open from 24 November 2025 , offering more founders from across the country the opportunity to receive an incubation package worth up to CZK 5 million.

Ján Mucha, co-founder and CEO of the startup Scicake, explained what makes the Fonafix diagnostic and therapeutic system groundbreaking.

How did the idea for Fonafix come about?
Basically, it came from the speech therapists themselves. It is a field that uses mostly outdated or no diagnostic technology. So speech therapists themselves are looking for tools to make their daily routine easier and to improve the quality of care for their patients. We have been working as a team in the field of dysarthria research for over 15 years (my personal 10th year). Thanks to our research we have gotten to work with leading Czech speech therapists, neurologists and other experts. The first idea for the system came about nine years ago when I started my doctoral studies at the Faculty of Speech and Language Therapy at the BUT. With a research team, we tried to create the first digitized system for speech disorder examination. The idea had a positive response, but nobody thought about commercialising it at that time. In 2022, we founded Scicake, a company that was originally only going to provide services for innovative companies. But after about a year and a half, we got the impulse to try to create our own product. As the healthcare sector is at the heart of our business, that’s where we looked for ideas and after six years we revived the idea of a dysarthria screening system. We teamed up with speech therapist Milena Košt’álová, who gave us the courage and other ideas, and we started to create a commercial product – Fonafix, which was launched on the market after two years of development.

In what ways is Fonafix most changing the face of contemporary speech therapy practice?
In a word – digitalisation. Most clinical speech therapists use pen and paper during the examination, and then transcribe the results into the information system of the clinic or hospital. The biggest added value of Fonafix at the moment is the automatic generation of the examination report. After the examination, the speech therapist has to spend 15 to 30 minutes writing the report. If he uses Fonafix, he has it generated in one click and can focus on more useful activities. However, we plan to influence the whole examination process by using so-called digital biomarkers from speech and face. This can be simply imagined as a set of numbers or values that we calculate from the audio and video recordings. These values can, for example, accurately quantify the quality of speech or the fluency of tongue movement. We then evaluate these data on a standardised scale or process them using artificial intelligence to make recommendations to the clinician. In this way, we create valuable information that brings a whole new dimension to the process of diagnosing and treating speech disorders.

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Isn’t the diagnosis of each case so specific that it cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence?
Of course, we do not plan to replace speech therapists and their work with artificial intelligence. Rather, experts in the field (including innovative doctors) are of the opinion that doctors will not be replaced by artificial intelligence, but by doctors who know how to use it. And that is a fact. Why? Imagine if you broke your arm and instead of an X-ray, the doctor just wrapped your leg in a bandage and sent you home. Nobody wants that, do they? Every doctor needs to see what the fracture looks like in order to set up the right therapy. And that’s the power of AI, to see things that the human senses can’t see. To make connections where our knowledge falls short. The output of AI is not deciding what a doctor should do, but providing accurate, objective and meaningful information to help them make decisions about a patient’s condition. This will not change in the coming decades. Moreover, there is a strict regulatory system in the EU that assesses not only the level of risk of a given system, but also the level of potential influence on a given doctor’s opinion. But that is a chapter in itself.

How many professionals have tested the system and how many are now using it regularly? (And, if applicable, at which workplaces?)
Fonafix has been tested quite comprehensively. The most significant testing took place at the Brno University Hospital, Motol University Hospital and three private outpatient clinics. Over 200 workplaces voluntarily participated in the final testing of the system, which represents about 20% of the total number of speech therapy facilities in the Czech Republic.

However, the first place in the real deployment of the system in clinical practice belongs to the Blansko Hospital, where Fonafix is already in use. Deployment in hospitals usually takes a longer time from a procedural point of view. We have been on the market for less than two months and some hospitals have an implementation process of up to 4-5 months. We are negotiating with several large hospitals such as FN Brno, FN Motol, but also FN Olomouc and others. Fonafix is also used in more private outpatient clinics.

What are the patient reactions to the new therapy format?
The therapy is still awaiting market launch and is not yet available. Fonafix is currently offering speech therapists in hospitals and clinics help with the diagnostic part, but we are also developing a part focused on follow-up therapy.
This will take the form of a mobile app that will allow the patient to continue therapy outside the office. The app will offer a variety of exercises tailored to the patient’s individual needs. The results will be automatically shared with the speech therapist, who will have an overview of the progress and regularity of the training and can change the exercises as needed.

We have had very positive reactions from the testing so far, not only from the patients, but also from their family members, caregivers and speech therapists. We are planning to launch early next year.

Fonafix uses the original Czech Test 3F dysarthric profile. Is it possible to scale up and localize the project for foreign markets even under these conditions?
That’s an excellent question. Yes, our system is language dependent and it is obvious that you cannot use the Czech version abroad. Therefore, we need to create our own language adaptation for each country, which needs to be clinically validated. We regularly present Fonafix on the international stage and this year alone we have been to six events in Spain, France, Germany and Malta. We have received very positive feedback not only from speech therapists in different countries, but also from representatives of leading institutions in Brazil, Mexico and Japan, for example.

We find that some countries have standardized different dysarthria testing. In such cases, we are negotiating with the authorities for a license to digitize and integrate the examination into the Fonafix system. However, many countries have no standard. There we have to sensitively find a compromise between speech therapists and create an adaptation that best suits their needs. Our goal is to bring as uniform a diagnostic procedure as possible based on objective metrics.

What are the next steps in product development?
The next steps are directly related to the amount of funding we can secure. First we will start the therapeutic part in the Czech Republic. At the same time we are working on the language adaptation for Spanish, which is crucial for our development. Almost all of Latin America speaks Spanish, making Spanish the second most spoken language in the world (after Mandarin). By adapting for the Spanish-speaking population, we will open the door to a market of around half a billion people. The typical question is: “Why not English?”. Simply because we don’t currently have an English-speaking country in the EU (the UK is no longer in the EU) and it is very expensive to enter the US market.

In parallel, we will continue to develop digital biomarkers and artificial intelligence. And we plan to introduce the first AI version of the system as early as the end of 2026. But this is not the end of our scaling. We are also working on other speech disorders, such as aphasia, to cover as wide a spectrum as possible. But our ambitions go even further. More on that next time.

Are you currently working on other projects in the field of digital health?
Yes, we have several concepts of our own in the works. At the same time, we help partner companies develop their innovative ideas. We also use our experience outside the healthcare sector. Here I would like to highlight our cooperation in the field of agriculture, which has a direct impact on both environmental quality and human health. Our vision is to build a company that delivers breakthrough solutions to improve quality of life based on proven scientific knowledge. We believe we are on the right track.

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