A clinician investigating a muscle harm will often begin the examination with questions on the affected person’s medical historical past and the way they suppose the harm occurred. The clinician may then place their fingers on the injured space and ask the affected person to maneuver round. Typically, the one quantitative information collected within the course of come from asking the affected person to make use of a ache scale from 1 to 10.
Evaluate that to the routine for treating a fever or hypertension. A health care provider or nurse can run a easy check and quantify the issue. After remedy begins, they will measure the affected person’s progress and decide how far they’re from a wholesome baseline.
That’s the form of exact, data-driven method the startup Figur8 is bringing to musculoskeletal analysis and remedy. The corporate, based by CEO Nan-Wei Gong SM ’09, PhD ’13, has created a sensor-based system that may monitor physique motion and muscle exercise to quantify the severity of accidents, assist medical doctors create remedy plans, and measure enchancment.
“Figur8 is a musculoskeletal diagnostic system,” says Gong, who’s at the moment a Media Lab analysis affiliate. “It’s an answer for the clinician and affected person to pinpoint the danger of harm, the supply of harm, and to quantify restoration in a well being class that historically doesn’t have a variety of scientific information available.”
Figur8 is working in well being clinics to collect information that can enhance its AI-driven predictive fashions. It’s reaching these clinics by partnering with insurers and employers. The corporate’s system has already been used to assist hundreds of sufferers, and Gong says the system will be capable of assist diagnose and deal with 80 p.c of musculoskeletal accidents by the tip of this 12 months.
Long term, Gong believes Figur8’s system may improve the form of home-based care that has skyrocketed in the course of the pandemic.
“Our imaginative and prescient is to create a self-diagnostic device that sufferers can use with their medical doctors,” Gong says. “If it’s straightforward sufficient to self-administer at residence, we are able to scale back in-person visits sooner or later. The appropriate device can clear up the puzzle of musculoskeletal residence care, from the diagnostic to therapeutic levels.”
Figur8 is Gong’s newest step into entrepreneurship. In 2013, she accomplished her PhD within the Responsive Environments Group within the Media Lab underneath Joe Paradiso, the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Professor at MIT. Her work centered on combining information from novel sensor designs. The work led to a collaboration with Ahmed Kirmani SM ’10, PhD ’15, Andrea Colaco SM ’10, PhD ’14 and Professor Vivek Okay. Goyal, who have been constructing algorithms to trace hand gestures.
Whereas nonetheless pursuing their PhDs, the researchers began an organization known as 3dim Applied sciences to deliver gesture recognition to smartphones and different gadgets. They went on to patent a know-how that allowed customers to work together with gadgets by making hand motions within the air.
The corporate received the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competitors in 2013 and garnered vital curiosity from trade. It was acquired by Google in 2014.
“[3dim] was an important expertise that helped me perceive what it means to commercialize a analysis mission and drive a marketing strategy,” Gong says. “I by no means would have gone via this new path with out it.”
Following that success, Gong continued at MIT as a analysis affiliate within the Media Lab, a place she’s held for the final seven years. In 2017, she determined to begin a brand new firm primarily based on wearable sensors.
“The MIT group is a good group to be in,” Gong says. “It’s completely different from different colleges as a result of MIT college students begin deep tech firms. … [Figur8’s] sensor system is just not a by-product of my PhD work, however the entire idea of utilizing wearables to quantify biomechanics began from a collaboration between [the Responsive Environments Lab] and Massachusetts Basic Hospital greater than 20 years in the past. In the present day, Figur8 works with the identical set of clinicians who’ve been investigating wearables with MIT for many years.”
Figur8 acquired help from the Media Lab-affiliated E14 Fund and spent the primary few years creating a platform primarily based on proprietary sensors, algorithms, and software program to assist customers perceive and reply to these findings.
Different high-speed, 3-D movement monitoring methods use dozens of pricy cameras mounted round a room. You see these methods when Hollywood studios present you film scenes earlier than the particular results are added, revealing actors in spandex fits lined in sensor-laden dots.
“We’ve designed a wearable system that maps joints, muscle teams, and tiny actions, and now we’re extra correct than the system that prices tons of of hundreds of {dollars},” Gong says. “Our system goes to be perhaps 5 p.c of the price of the main imaginative and prescient monitoring system, as a result of we don’t want the markers, we don’t want the room, or the supercomputer within the background — every little thing is calculated in your cell app.”
Gong says establishing Figur8 can be sooner than establishing conventional methods. For a full-body analysis, customers strap seven sensors on their physique. To guage a particular muscle group or joint, the system works with just one or two sensors. The sensors ship information to a cell app that walks customers via a sequence of actions just like a bodily examination. The system makes use of a know-how known as floor mechanomyography, which tracks tiny muscle actions to measure contractions and different muscle exercise. A report is then mechanically generated that reveals the variations between a wholesome individual’s musculoskeletal efficiency and the person’s.
“The report means that you can spotlight anomalies in muscle contraction and high quality, in addition to vary of movement, and you’ll monitor progress,” Gong says. “You’ll hear a bodily therapist or a coach say, ‘I can inform what harm you’ve gotten by the way in which you stroll.’ That takes a variety of expertise. We’ve translated that to information and analytics.”
When the pandemic first disrupted nonessential well being care procedures, Gong noticed Figur8’s system as a technique to deliver the rise in telemedicine to musculoskeletal accidents. She believes the corporate is on monitor to meet that mission.
“The imaginative and prescient for the following era of this product is to let everybody have entry to this at residence.”
