Wearable health technology spin-out secures first round investment
Posted November 02, 2016
- Kinesis products used in prevention of falls in older adults
- Also used in assessment of gait and rehabilitation
UCD spin-out company (opens in a new window)Kinesis Health Technologies has raised €590,000 in its first investment round. The company develops wearable sensor-based technology to provide better clinical insights. It will use the investment to expand global sales of its health diagnostic devices.
The funding was raised from a consortium of private investors alongside a High-Potential Start-up (HPSU) investment from (opens in a new window)Enterprise Ireland.
One of its registered medical devices, Kinesis QTUG™ utilises body-worn sensors combined with signal processing and machine learning methods, to provide a quantitative assessment of a patient’s mobility, frailty and falls risk, plus statistical comparisons against population averages for age and gender.
“This funding will enable us to expand our engineering and commercial teams and grow sales of our intelligent health diagnostic devices which are addressing a major problem in the global health industry, in the area of mobility and falls risk assessment and gait assessment in older adults,” said Seamus Small, CEO and co-founder of Kinesis Health Technologies.
Kinesis’ proprietary technologies are used by healthcare professionals to improve their ability to identify those patients at risk of falls and in need of help and intervention, to quantify a patient’s response to therapy and rehabilitation, and to assess patients for neurological disorders.
Pictured (l-r) at NexusUCD, the Industry Partnership Centre are; Colm MacFhionnlaoich, Manager, HPSU Industrial Products and Life Sciences, Enterprise Ireland, Dr Barry Greene, CTO and co-founder, Kinesis Health Technologies and Seamus Small, CEO and co-founder, Kinesis Health Technologies.
Photograph: Nick Bradshaw, Fotonic.
Falls in older adults are a major problem worldwide with an estimated 30% of adults, over 65 years of age, falling at least once each year. The direct and indirect societal costs of falls in older adults are enormous and in the US alone, such costs have been estimated to be in the region of US$20 billion per year.
The technology has been scientifically validated through an extensive programme of top-tier internationally peer-reviewed research in falls prevention over the past eight years, based on a large patient dataset.
Kinesis has recently released a second product, Kinesis Gait™, a portable and flexible tool for clinical gait analysis. Kinesis Gait™ is intended for use in clinical trials, to assess rehabilitation improvements and to assess for neurological disorders such as Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.
The company has already secured customers in Ireland, UK, US, Canada and Australia and aims to expand commercial activities in these countries, and in new territories, over the next 18 months.
Kinesis was founded in 2013 by Seamus Small and Dr Barry Greene as a spin-out company from the Technology Research for Independent Living (TRIL) Centre, a large ageing research programme, at UCD. The company is currently headquartered at NexusUCD, the University’s Industry Partnership Centre.
By: Jonny Baxter, digital journalist, UCD University Relations
