In the intro, I said that Kinetisense was the first markerless 3D motion caption tool. Many people may not know what that is. Could you explain it and why it is so crucial for your practitioners?
Dr. Ryan Comeau: When I started to research as to why many of these practitioners decide not to use gold standards of assessment tools to get numbers and like I said, 75% of these practitioners are eyeballing their assessments; I started to look into why. The reason why is that in a practitioner’s day to day workflow, so to speak, anything that will slow them down in their workflow, because they need to be efficient, they tend to move aside or not use in their clinic. That is why the goniometer and inclinometer, these tools that are gold standards up until now, aren’t being used by 75% of these practitioners because they are just too slow. Even though it is more subjective, they only eyeball the assessment instead of using instruments. There’s this trade-off. What we are seeing is this trade-off between efficiency and objectivity. That is why some practitioners are using tools, and some aren’t.
Our goal was to try to figure out a solution that we could have the practitioner more objective than ever, but also more efficient than ever. What that meant was having an assessment system that did not require having to put on wearable sensors on the body. That is what the term markerless means. We do not have to put any bands on the body. We do not have to put any markers, anything like that which then obviously saves the practitioner much time. The other issue with some of these systems where we must place markers on the body is that now we are bringing subjectivity back into play. Placement of the marker can vary from one session to the next which brings inaccuracies into play. The beautiful thing with the Kinect camera is the Kinect camera uses three different types of sensors to get its data. It uses a sonar camera, which gives depth perception and maps the body and uses infrared, which maps the heat distribution of the body and a high definition camera. These three sensors allow for a very accurate representation of human biomechanics and place the marker on the person, reproduces every single time at every assessment. That is what we mean by markerless motion capture.
The other great thing about this system, because it has the sonar, which is the depth perception, we can get overhead data from a single front on facing camera. You cannot get this type of data with an iPhone app or some of these other products that are two dimensional. Kinetisense, with a single front on facing camera, shows the tilts in the frontal plane of the body, the shoulder tilt left to right, the hip tit left to right, but it also shows the rotation of the body from the overhead view without having to have an overhead camera. What we found is that this overhead view is a view that is not analyzed. Anytime you have a practitioner that will examine you visually for movement or posture; they are not looking at that overhead perspective. That is the plane that is the most important when it comes to compensations. The body will go into rotational torque to try to compensate for weakness in the hips or tightness in the low back or tightness in the front of our dominant shoulder from poor posture or working at desk jobs all our lives. That is the valuable data that Kinetisense can provide and doing it without having to put on wearables and without having to have multiple cameras around the body. We can do this with one single portable camera.
That is impressive. You currently have a wide range of organizations using your system. Can you talk about the types that are using it and how they are using it?
Dr. Ryan Comeau: The exciting thing with Kinetisense is that when you are analyzing biomechanics, there are so many different fields that apply. From a business standpoint, it is a blessing but can somewhat be a curse. We naturally try to concentrate on specific markets. Kinetisense is used around the world. We are in over 25 different countries currently. Medical doctors are using us. Researchers are using us. We were used in a Parkinson’s study not too long ago. We are being used in a study right now for assessing individuals in wheelchairs. This research is being conducted in Poland. Kinetisense is also being used by Buurtzorg, International which is the world’s largest geriatric assessment group in the world based out of the Netherlands and we have created a product with them for assessing the risk of a fall, for balance.
We also are being used widely by practitioners, such as chiropractors and physiotherapists around the world. Obviously, for the clinical applications, range of motion, posture, different things like this. Recently, we have had a push into the fitness component with a new product that we have coming out called KAMS, which stands for the Kinetisense Advanced Movement Screen. We were chatting a little bit about that earlier in our call here, Phil, with being able to assess mechanics. Our system captures 2,000 data points from the seven evidence-based functional movements. We have been getting into the fitness industry. We have a bunch of gym chains in North America that are very, very interested in incorporating this. We even had some very high-profile athletes and professional organizations, sports organizations using the system as well. Recently, the Miami Heat. For anywhere from ergonomic assessment by corporations to the medical practitioner, to the rehab practitioner, to the fitness trainer, they are all using Kinetisense. That was the ultimate goal of Kinetisense, is bridging the gap is what we call it. How do we get these different practitioners that are in various fields communicating? Right now, more than ever, rehab and functional medicine is very much a multidisciplinary approach, and it is impossible for these diverse groups to speak the same language if they are using different assessment tools.
