Kinesis Health Technologies, an Irish health technology start-up, has been declared overall winner of the Tech Day pitching competition, held during the 21st International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics (IAGG) World Congress in San Francisco.
At the World Congress, which takes place every four years, some 6,000 experts in the field of ageing gathered together to share their knowledge on improving the health, welfare, and rights of a growing proportion of the world’s population.
At the Tech Day event, Technology and Ageing – Innovation for Independence and Innovation, Kinesis pitched against a number of leading start-ups, from around the world working in the ageing technology space, and won a $4,500 (€3,900) prize.
Kinesis, a spin-out from University College Dublin (UCD), develops products that help prevent falls in older adults using wearable sensor technologies.
Kinesis QTUG, a Class I medical device, based on nine years of research, is used by healthcare professionals to improve their ability to identify those patients at risk of falls and to prescribe an intervention, to quantify a patient’s response to therapy and rehabilitation, and to assess patients for neurological disorders.
Falls in older adults are a serious global problem and the WHO estimates that 30% of adults, over 65 years of age, fall at least once each year. The direct and indirect societal costs of falls in older adults are enormous and in the US alone, such costs have been estimated to be in the region of $30 billion per year.
After winning the Tech Day Award, Seamus Small, CEO and co-founder of Kinesis Health Technologies said: “We are delighted to have won the Tech Day pitch competition at such a prestigious international ageing conference. This prize provides great recognition for the Kinesis team and provides further external validation of the value and impact of our products to the global ageing care market.
“Ageing is one of the great global challenges, and innovation is, and will be, essential in bringing measurable impact to this challenge. Kinesis’ technology brings real measurability to one of the most critical factors in ageing, the risk of falls.”
Kinesis was founded in 2013 by Seamus Small and Dr Barry Greene as a spin-out company from the Technology Research for Independent Living (TRIL) Centre, a large ageing research programme, at UCD.
The company, an Enterprise Ireland High-Potential Start-Up (HPSU), has already secured customers for its products in Ireland, UK, US, Canada and Australia, and has partners in place in India, Japan, Germany and The Netherlands. Kinesis is headquartered at NexusUCD, the Industry Partnership Centre at UCD.
Last November Kinesis announced that it had closed its first investment round and secured €590,000 from a consortium of private investors and Enterprise Ireland.
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