Millions around the world have a stroke every year and millions more are recovering from a stroke they’ve had. Regaining the use of affected limbs and abilities is a long road, but one that can be shortened by intensive rehabilitation efforts – that Neurophenix has shown can take place at home rather than during frequent trips to the hospital. The Neuroball device and home therapy platform have generated $7 million in new funding to expand and deepen the platform.
The problem with existing stroke rehabilitation techniques is not that they are ineffective, but that they are usually located in hospitals and thus limit how often they can be used.
“Rehabilitation, especially neural rehabilitation, has focused on large, bulky equipment in facilities for many, many years,” explains Gillem Singla, CEO and co-founder (with CTO Dimitrios Athanasiou) of Neurofenix. “We extracted the essence of what needs to be done in neural rehabilitation: it should be intense, engaging, motivating and push people to follow not just weeks, but months and years.”
There are a number of home rehab devices, often in the form of gloves or freehand movement tracking, both of which work to some degree, but don’t kick in.
“Before we even started developing the first products, we talked to hundreds of patients, hundreds of therapists, tested everything – I personally, when a family member had a stroke, had to try many things,” Singla said. “The first urgent need that was completely neglected was upper limb rehabilitation: 80% of patients suffer from arm and hand disorders after a stroke.”
The company’s solution is the Neuroball, an easy-to-grip and strap-on device that tracks every movement of the upper limb from shoulder to fingertips. It doesn’t do anything radically different from the hospital, but rather allows patients to perform the rehabilitation exercises and movements much more frequently, and in a way that suits their specific needs and capabilities.
It includes a motion and orientation sensor for wrist, elbow and shoulder movements and individual sensors for each finger. The ball rests in a cradle but can be picked up and moved freely.
“The key is neuroplasticity,” Singla said. “The evidence shows that the more reps a patient does, the greater the recovery rate. In a typical session, a patient does between 30 and 40 movements with a therapist, and in our clinical studies we have shown that patients did more than 600 a day.”
Ease of use, gamification, and a little algorithmic tweaking are what the company claims results in this massive increase in exercise — and according to studies they’ve conducted, better results, including improved range of motion and less pain.
It’s easier to put on than a resistive glove, doesn’t take up much space, runs the software on a small, dedicated tablet, and has a handful of different games available for each movement the patient needs to perform. These are simple yet motivating things, like an endless racer where you squeeze to jump, or a Space Invaders game where you twist your wrist to move your ship. It may not be Fortnite, but it’s better than just seeing some go up. There are even leaderboards in case a user wants to compare their progress with that of a fellow patient.
The promise of improved home rehabilitation is one that will almost certainly appeal to many people for whom going to the hospital or physical therapy practice three or four times a week is impractical. Such a schedule would be difficult for anyone, let alone someone with mobility, speech, or upper limb limitations.
Doing the exercises at home and on your own time, with the software adapting to the patient’s own rhythms and preferences (such as being more flexible in the morning or evening), naturally leads to much more rehabilitation work without additional clinical resources. (“Last week, a patient even reached 300 days in a row on our platform,” Singla noted.)
The main hurdle is affordability: The device is too new to be covered by insurance, although it does qualify for HSA and FSA expenses. So far, the Buenos Aires-based company has conducted a handful of tests demonstrating the Neuroball’s efficacy, but not the type needed to be covered as a prescription medical device. But that’s next on the agenda now that they have another round of $7 million in the bank.
“The reason we brought this Series A to market was that we had clear goals in mind,” said Singla, who primarily established its commercial and clinical presence in the US and then expanded into adjacent forms of therapy.
“Our goal is to be the leader of neural rehabilitation at home, not only for stroke, but also for trauma,” he continued. “We have literally 400 ideas in our backlog of improvements that we can make: extensions, cognitive training, speech and language…if you think about the needs of a neurological patient, they are vastly varied. There are so many other therapies we can look at.”
The $7 million A round was led by AlbionVC, with participation from HTH, InHealth Ventures and existing investors. The device is not yet publicly available, but curious clinicians and prospective patients are encouraged to get in touch for possible collaboration.
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