Pictured from left: Colm MacFhionnlaoich, manager of HPSU industrial products and life sciences, Enterprise Ireland; Dr Barry Greene and Seamus Small, co-founders of Kinesis Health Technologies. Image: Nick Bradshaw/Fotonic
Kinesis Health Technologies, the creator of devices that prevent falls in older people, has raised €590,000 to expand global sales.
Kinesis, a UCD medtech spin-out, has closed its first investment round to expand global sales of its intelligent health diagnostic devices.
The funding has been raised from a consortium of private investors alongside a High-Potential Start-up (HPSU) investment from Enterprise Ireland.
Kinesis was founded in 2013 by Seamus Small and Dr Barry Greene, as a spin-out company from the Technology Research for Independent Living Centre, a large ageing research programme at University College Dublin.
Intelligent health diagnostics
“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,” Small explained.
“The funding will also enable us to develop and to enhance our technologies further.”
Kinesis’s 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.
The company’s main product is Kinesis QTUG, a registered medical device, and it utilises body-worn sensors combined with signal processing and machine-learning methods. This provides a quantitative assessment of a patient’s mobility, frailty and falls risk, plus statistical comparisons against population averages for age and gender.
Kinesis has also recently released a second product, Kinesis Gait, which is a portable and flexible tool for clinical gait analysis. Kinesis Gait is intended for use in clinical trials to assess rehabilitation improvements and neurological disorders such as Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.
Falls in elderly people are a major problem worldwide, with an estimated 30pc of adults over 65 years of age falling at least once each year. The direct and indirect societal costs of falls in mature adults are enormous and in the US alone, such costs have been estimated to be in the region of $20bn per year.
“A key focus for Enterprise Ireland is the commercialisation of research and development,” said Colm MacFhionnlaoich, manager of HPSU industrial products and life sciences at Enterprise Ireland.
“Kinesis Health Technologies is a great example of how Enterprise Ireland’s commercialisation agenda brings relevant discoveries and intellectual property from Ireland’s third-level institutions to highly competitive markets.”
