A HELPING HAND

Can you tell us more about your product and the benefits it has in aiding athletes and patients with movement disorders and Parkinson’s?

One out of five soccer players will injure their hamstrings each season, Manchester United pays >£15M to injured players' salaries in one season, and we believe this is because of a lack of information during training. Sports scientists and coaches have many advanced tools at their disposal, but nothing that can help them understand what is happening at the local muscle level. We provide performance coaches and physical therapists information about specific muscles to help them adjust training progressions to athletes’ personalised needs for their specific sport and use this information to optimize performance, training with injury prevention in mind. Our data and analysis have saved Olympic teams over 30% of the time in the weight room while making them perform better- we have two athletes we work with competing now in the Beijing 2022 Olympics.

The same technology can provide a selection of the same outputs as a >€200k motion capture lab. These outputs are the gold standard for assessing movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s, but time in the lab is expensive, requires the space occupied by two hospital rooms, requires an expert to operate and analyze the outcomes, can have >2 week waiting times, and it can take weeks to analyze the results.

One in four people with Parkinson’s is misdiagnosed. With our device, we analyse movement in a more natural environment, at a fraction of the cost, with a low-profile device, without the need for an expert to operate it, and we provide actionable analysis outputs within 24 hours, leading to quicker and more effective diagnostic outcomes and we are working with the #2 rehabilitation hospital globally, the UMCG, to validate our device in this context and plan to submit for publication this year. This is a very scalable device.

In this exclusive interview, Maria Debrincat sits down with Tanya Colonna, CEO of Oro Muscles and Med-Tech World’s first Pitch winner, as she muscles in on her product and its benefits in improving training, rehabilitation and pushing the healthcare industry towards preventative care and telemedicine.

Can you briefly explain the process involved in manifesting your current project to its full potential?

Developing and providing value in each market involves focus and strategically timed expansion. Right now, we’re focusing on elite athletics, but our validation strategy doubles as we build up data for future regulatory approval and expansion into sports medicine and general rehabilitation.

Oro Muscles has secured a worldwide exclusive licensing deal with trusted, medical EMG suppliers. Can you tell us more about this deal?

We are the only company legally allowed to use the best sensor system on the market containing EMG + IMU in the field of elite sports and rehabilitation.

This year you took home Med-Tech World’s first pitch winner Award, how crucial is this award to a growing brand like yours?

We’re at a crucial inflection point in our company’s development – research, development, and hundreds of customer interviews have come together into a product that has proven utility in multiple markets. Taking home the Med-Tech World’s pitch award shows that our vision resonates with experts in our target markets and that we are on the road to a truly scalable, revolutionary solution.

What makes your company different from other medical brands?

The same fundamental technology that we have developed can optimise both elite sports and rehabilitation. This means that, unlike most medical brands, we don’t have to wait until we achieve regulatory approval and figure out reimbursement before we can generate revenue. We’re generating revenue now and reinvesting that to expand into medical, meaning we reduce the risk for our investors.

What are the goals you've set for yourselves in 2022 and how are you planning on getting there? Are there any challenges you expect to face in the coming year?

In 2022, we will raise funds to expand our team and continue iterating our product as we learn from our growing customer base about what they want to see and how we can more smoothly fit into their workflow. The most challenging part of this will be to make our marketing as cool as our productwe’re completely redesigning our website and our approach to social media; there is so much value packed into this technology, and we need to figure out how to quickly and clearly express this to the right people.

TAKING HOME THE MED-TECH WORLD’S PITCH AWARD SHOWS THAT OUR VISION RESONATES WITH EXPERTS IN OUR TARGET MARKETS AND THAT WE ARE ON THE ROAD TO A TRULY SCALABLE, REVOLUTIONARY SOLUTION.

When we started working on Med-Tech, we both set out with the intention of being an integral part of the revolution of the healthcare industry. For us, 2021 was just the start, as we continue to push in 2022, making it another pivotal year for us. At the beginning of last year, we highlighted the technologies that we thought were going to dominate 2021. Our predictions turned true, globally there was the emergence of many new healthcare pathways involving the increasing use of AI and IoMT.

Our prediction this year is on a longer timescale and perhaps more bullish than usual. We believe that in the next decade we will see healthcare applications to the metaverse or the healthcare metaverse if you will.

Looking at the concept of the metaverse in basic terms it is the assimilation of a number of technologies that enable the integration of physical with digital. Whilst telehealth has blurred the lines a bit in the past number of years, significant advancements in augmented and virtual reality as well as ever-increasing energy-efficient distributed ledger systems (blockchain) are bringing forward ideas that were never thought to be possible.

Multinational conglomerates are already investing heavily in the general idea of the metaverse. NVIDIA for example with its Omniverse platform is already implementing its idea of a work type metaverse in certain industries enabling life-like interactions on a platform for creators, designers and collaborators to work. Meta is another company moving rapidly in this space, after all this was the reason for a change in the name. A video posted in November by the company shows incredible progress with haptic glove technology that allows the user to experience the sense of touch in the virtual world. allowing the user to experience the sense of touch in the virtual world.

Whilst Meta's product and to a certain extent NVIDIA's projects are primarily aimed at the industries such as gaming you can easily see the applications of the above in healthcare.

There are also early healthcare case studies favouring the idea. Not needing to look far, Microsoft has piloted using the Hololens technology in remote care and healthcare education amongst others. Now imagine, adding haptic feedback to surgical VR education simulation or simulating an immersive critical incident to train emergency responders. And the applications are almost endless. From gamification for improving health and fitness to surgeons having the patient's CT scan virtually imprinted on the patient during surgery aiding in even more precise surgical resections.

Whilst all of this sounds incredible we do appreciate that there will be key challenges that will be encountered. Perhaps one of the most important questions concerns how it will all work. Unlike other industries, in healthcare, we can't afford to not have interoperable components. So will the healthcare metaverse be one main open-source platform with key players allowed to plug and play provided they hit key security criteria? Secondly, we need several clinical trials and real-world use cases. We are starting to understand now that AI research in healthcare is still lagging and enclosed in a silo. Whilst we assume that AI + humans = better healthcare, there are no clinical trials to support this. This brings us to the third obstacle, patient data in the metaverse. Undoubtedly, the metaverse will generate a humongous amount of data, some of which may be in the hands of less trustworthy companies. Whilst companies knowing what kind of burger we like is not going to affect us much, companies knowing our genetic predisposition might affect a lot of things including insurance premiums.

The metaverse is still in its early days but we think that just like us you should be early on this bandwagon as it's a certain part of health 4.0. If you want to know more, feel free to connect with us.