AuraSense Tech Uses Haptics to Help Physical Therapists Improve Hand Health

Recognizing a decrease in qualified healthcare professionals led this innovative “digiceuticals” company to develop better, more accessible care management for patients and providers through haptics and an immersive Metaverse experience.

Challenge

There is a significant increase in demand for hand therapy care due to the aging population, pervasive technology utilization (i.e., video games, computers, cell phones), and work injuries. Despite this rise in demand, the number of physical therapists (PT) and occupational therapists (OT) who provide progressive treatment — exercises that work over a period to heal, strengthen, and support better muscle and movement control — is on the decline. The International Society for Hand Therapy cites that there is one hand therapist for every 100,000 people in the United States. In addition, there are care deserts where the closest care provider is hours away from the patient. This makes providing care for those at-risk for worsening hand health in trouble and without a clear solution. Even beyond the demand and scarcity issues, care providers are underpaid, making it difficult to retain current clinicians or attract new ones. There is also limited access to actionable data that providers can use to improve outcomes. Both providers and patients are losing out in these scenarios, and the PT/OT system is suffering.

One critical question: How can clinicians gather better, more efficient hand movement data from patients in order to guide their care more effectively, and then present that data back to the patient in actionable ways?

The answer came from an unlikely source: a Portable Handheld Acoustic Speaker Disruptor invented for the US Navy.

Origin Story

Dr. David Charlot and Amber Ivey first met as kids. Both military brats, their parents were stationed in Stuttgart, Germany, where they became lifelong friends. Amber, whose background is in performance management and data, lives with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), enduring hand assessments with her doctor at every checkup. She noticed little data collection other than her physician manually writing down observations that weren’t shared with her. Amber never knew whether she was doing the exercises correctly, if the way she performed the tasks meant she was getting weaker or stronger, or how the information gathered helped her condition.

Dr. Charlot, an engineer with a PhD in Bioengineering, has been involved with healthcare startups for the past 15 years, creating quantitative tools for better outcomes in the fields of cancer diagnostics, infectious disease, and drug discovery. He’s also the parent of a child with special needs who attends regular physical and occupational therapy appointments. When the pandemic hit and PT clinics shut down, in-home and Zoom sessions became the norm.

During one of these in-home sessions, Dr. Charlot, asked questions about the OT’s process. He explained he created digital healthcare solutions, and knowing his daughter’s needs he wondered if there might be a better way to approach her care. Perhaps it could be made easier for clinicians to use the information from these sessions to correlate certain activities to patient improvement and the therapist admitted they needed better tools for assessing progress and including their patients in their own care.

Dr. Charlot’s initial thought was that immersive video game motion capture technology might work. After all, your entire body interacts with these activities. Why not use it for physical therapy and capture how the body is moving digitally rather than manually? Clinicians could then gather/process data more efficiently, leading to more in-depth analysis for optimum results.

To get started on this quest, David joined NSIN (National Security Innovation Network) Foundry, a Department of Defense technology startup incubator in March 2022. There he met Zavosh Zaboliyan, whose background was media, marketing, and advising companies on how to raise funds. Zavosh was living his own unsatisfying PT story due to a car accident and in speaking with David, he realized his experience was the norm and wanted to fix it for others.

At the incubator, David and Zavosh were paired with a team from NSWC CRANE working on a technology for peaceful crowd control and suppression. The team presented an acoustic speaker disruptor (a miniature sound gun) created to temporarily keep people from talking. Consisting of a “condenser shotgun” microphone with an ultrasonic transducer array pointed in the speaker’s direction, within 200 milliseconds of speaking, your voice is projected back to you, causing you to stop talking. It’s based on the known psychophysics phenomenon that if you hear yourself speak out of sync, you’ll stop because you believe you’re talking to yourself (an experience common to those suffering from Schizophrenia). Intrigued, Dr. Charlot jokingly asked if the technology could also create energy impulses that would make someone feel like they’re getting punched in the face. The team at CRANE explained how it could and David got a “Eureka” moment thinking the solution can be adapted for use in physical therapy.

The final piece came together when Amber Ivey joined the duo, bringing her experience in data analysis, and firsthand experience managing multiple sclerosis. The three formalized AuraSense Tech Corporation and completed the NSIN Foundry program, where they won a $20K prize on demo day, in the fall of 2022.

Through market discovery and business development conversations, the three discovered that about 20 percent of all US emergency room visits are hand-related injuries. The team spoke with veterans and other patients who mentioned still feeling lingering pain from years-old injuries and the inability to manipulate their hands efficiently because they never received optimal and complete care. This part of our body we think little about until it doesn’t work can be debilitating and they agreed to focus on hands.

After developing their first prototype that utilized mid-air haptics (an adaptation of the Navy technology), augmented reality, and edge computing they presented at the Cade Prize event in Gainesville, Florida. Their solution excited attendees who could literally “feel” computer generated invisible sound objects and see their hand tracked in real-time in a virtual environment. A medical instrument supplier in attendance appreciated the idea of their solution and shared words of wisdom. He pointed out that the PT world was overwhelmed with costs. He also shared that there is a big market opportunity if the company focused on automating hand assessments to help physicians better manage their time and increase the number of patients they can serve each day. By shifting the narrative to the financial benefits of performing more carpal tunnel relief surgeries (for example) rather than conducting manual hand assessments, the new AuraSense Tech team would have a business.

That’s when it hit: there is an opportunity cost problem. By automating hand assessments, a lower-level tech or even a robot could manage data gathering while the physician provided care.

This clarity of focus opened their minds to other ways their solution could thrive financially while providing the relief and support both patient and clinician need in the hand therapy space.

Since attending Cade Prize, AuraSense showcased their product at TechCrunch Disrupt in October 2022 and CES in January 2023. They will also be showcasing at Lake Nona Impact Health 2023 in March 2023, and conducting early product testing at USF Health and Tampa VA in April 2023.

Under the Hood

Focusing on spinal injuries and MS for their use case, AuraSense Tech’s first solution is neither diagnostic or therapeutic, replacing manual note taking with an automated performance assessment tool that captures the appropriate data for a patient’s treatment.

Their solution, a digital haptics pad, accesses patient medical records and doctor’s notes via machine learning then customizes the pad to the patient’s hand by creating acoustic sound objects and creates the equivalent of a “functional dynamic x-ray.” Utilizing data points on the affected hand to understand the baseline condition at the start of treatment, recommended activities are automatically adjusted to accommodate the care journey, closing the information loop to progress the patient’s rehabilitation. The doctor can see the patient remotely, using AR to virtually access thermographic imaging to look inside the person’s limbs to study blood flow, modality, and where pain points are to provide better outcomes.

The team is also sensitive to the physical and occupational therapists who either struggle financially or still have passion for their profession but can’t afford to indulge it. Creating a gig-economy model for their solution means PT and OT could run a clinic out of their own homes based on the vision AuraSense Tech has shared. By creating virtual treatment, these clinicians can see many clients and more frequently. The team has a desire to bring those underemployed or unemployed professionals back to the jobs they love and allow them to provide the kind of care patients deserve from experts who understand best how to help them heal. They are finding ways to expand opportunity in the physical therapy space by offering economic benefit for providers and better access for patients.

As an NSIN startup, Aurasense Tech is starting to work with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which serves 20 percent of all people in the United States who suffer from spinal injuries and are at risk of losing hand function. The VA is also the number one supplier of physical therapists in the US, and the people helped, and the insight gained from this partnership will prove invaluable.

Why We’re Proud to Invest

AuraSense Tech has taken the time to understand the pain points of clinicians and patients and believes the digital platform they have landed on will be useful in providing care for other disease models. Getting their technology into as many hands as possible — creating an OEM approach for this whole ecosystem to allow other healthcare providers and groups to go through the same process on their platform — is their goal. It can mean providing better wellness to all and if they can be the conduit for that, it will be worth all the hard work.

Their inclusivity captivates StartUp Health as does their fast-track thinking. AuraSense Tech is providing innovative solutions through proven cutting-edge technology that is primed for quick deployment. Their main tech comes from ultrasonic phased era technology pioneered in satellites and radar communications, and their haptic pad is open-sourced and currently being used for automotive touchscreen kiosks in cars. That choice to borrow from another industry to create a solution that can be kicked off to do the most good in the most efficient and expedient way makes it clear to StartUp Health that AuraSense Tech is passionate about bringing quality healthcare to this sector and understands how to utilize the tech available to them in the best way possible.

Per the AuraSense team, the largest rise in hand-related injuries is in children between ages 6–15 due to video controllers and cellphones. Technology usage is changing the landscape and requirements for care, with kids experiencing osteoarthritis and carpal tunnel. These issues combined with the ways this demographic likes to be engaged demands a new type of care delivery to ensure the most effective treatment making the most impact.

StartUp Health recognizes the personal attachment and connection that led to AuraSense Tech creating their solution and that hits at the heart of health innovation. This is a true team and their commitment to the path of their technological journey and each other is obvious.

Join us in welcoming AuraSense to the StartUp Health family!

→ Learn more and connect with the AuraSense team.

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AuraSense Tech Uses Haptics to Help Physical Therapists Improve Hand Health was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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