Falls can be serious at any age but, as people get older, their risk of falling increases, often with catastrophic consequences. How someone walks is key to identifying risk. However, access to gait analysis is far from universal, while there are also issues around the accuracy of existing measurement techniques.
It was this combination of factors that inspired Dr Aidan Boran to develop GaitKeeper, an AR and AI-based platform that turns any space into a gait assessment lab and provides clinicians with reliable, objective, standardised tools to assess risk.
Gait speed is an important health biomarker that not only flags frailty and fall risk, but also disability, cognitive decline and the risk of cardiac events. Increasing assessment throughput is key to early intervention and prevention, but existing services don’t have the capacity to ramp up. What was needed was a fast, easy-to-use, cost-effective alternative and, in Boran’s mind, this meant developing a system that understood and accurately quantified human movement without the need for sensors, wearable devices or expensive, bulky equipment.
With more than 25 years’ research and development behind him in areas such as computer vision, artificial intelligence and data analytics, Boran was in a better position than most to make this happen. Five years ago he teamed up with Tallaght University Hospital’s Prof Seán Kennelly, a consultant in geriatric and stroke medicine, to build what has since become the GaitKeeper platform.
GaitKeeper works with a smartphone/tablet and creates a “virtual walkway”, which clinicians can see but patients can’t. This is to encourage them to walk as they normally do. As the patient moves forward a video is generated that is analysed according to predefined algorithms. The system takes precise measurements across a number of parameters including gait speed, stride length and flexion. It also notes the position of key joints such as the hip, knee and ankle to identify abnormalities.
GaitKeeper’s sweet spot is that it can assess patients wherever they are – at home, in primary care or in outpatient services – and this liberates space, time and cost for healthcare facilities. The assessment is available to any healthcare professional at any time and follows the patient throughout the healthcare system. The platform can be integrated into existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other digital health platforms. GaitKeeper processes and stores data in the cloud and Boran believes it can become the standard tool in what is potentially a multibillion-euro market.
GaitKeeper’s first-use case is to detect fall and frailty risk. However, it can also be used to assess patient response to rehabilitation and has further applications in areas such as disability, diabetes and neurological disorders.
GaitKeeper comes in two versions: one for acute hospitals, rehab facilities and nursing homes; the other for individual healthcare professionals such as physio and occupational therapists. The system is also suitable for use by GPs. The revenue model is software-as-a-service (SaaS) for enterprise users, while practitioners will pay based on the number of patients/clinicians using the system.
The company was spun out from Dublin City University in 2023 and employs six people. The system is in use across multiple sites and the company is generating revenue.
Investment to date is around €1 million between private funding and support from Enterprise Ireland through its third-level commercialisation fund. The company is now in the process of raising seed and angel investment. Recognising that the founders’ strengths are clinical and technical rather than commercial, the company has appointed the health services group Uniphar as its reseller for GaitKeeper.
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