FIGUR8 announces the launch of its digital health platform designed to objectively measure and longitudinally track body movement as a biomarker, and capture micrometer precision muscle and joint movement to help diagnose soft-tissue injuries.
The new system, developed by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Sports Science Lab and MIT Media Lab researchers, provides a movement assessment that produces and analyzes data points to generate actionable biomechanical insights for clinicians.
These insights can then help clinicians establish a movement health baseline, diagnose movement dysfunction, identify injury risk, optimize exercise routines and monitor progress.
FIGUR8 is currently working with elite athletes, teams, training facilities and major occupational and physical therapy clinics. These early developmental partnerships allow FIGUR8 to generate data assets that can be used for clinical studies by major medical centers in areas such as Parkinson’s disease and stroke diagnostics and recovery, a media release from FIGUR8 explains.
“Measuring musculoskeletal performance and recovery has historically been limited to visual and hands-on assessments, providing little to no quantifiable data,” says Habib Haddad of E14 Fund, which participated in a seed round led by P5 Health Ventures to fund the product launch.
“This limitation makes accurate, large-scale and cost-effective treatment assessments nearly impossible. We believe FIGUR8 has identified a significant technological breakthrough and look forward to advancing the understanding of human movement through the company’s groundbreaking sensor technologies.”
FIGUR8 combines lightweight, low-profile and highly accurate sensors with proprietary algorithms to map sensor information with the biomechanics of the human body. The company’s FlexTech Sensors can be manually applied to multiple body locations to collect data unobtrusively. The advanced movement data – including muscle activation timing and intensity with joint angles, acceleration and motion in 3D space – is then made instantly available through a web-based platform.
“FIGUR8 is completely unique in its ability to aid clinicians in quantifying mobility health markers captured during any activity,” states FIGUR8 CEO, Dr. Nan-Wei Gong. “These assessments highlight the weaknesses and anomalies of body segments, which could be a symptom of an injury, disease, or simply a target for performance optimization.”
For more information, visit FIGUR8.
[Source(s): FIGUR8, Business Wire]
