restore mobility to millions of stroke patients for 15,000 euros
The Spanish company Robopedics has presented the final design of Awake, your bionic mobility assistance device. It is a unique product in the world and is developed with a clear and very specific objective: to help people who have suffered a stroke rehabilitate and regain the ability to walk. You have probably heard of this disease, but it is also very likely that you do not know its subsequent impact: 93% of those who survive end up having significant consequences, and in fact 82% end up having continuous dependence and permanent help in the chronic phase. Many lose their autonomy and ability to walk. And that’s where Robopedics comes in. From the storage room to a promising medical revolution TO Ivan MartinezCEO and co-founder of Robopedics, it didn’t occur to him that he wanted to create a company to help stroke patients walk again. The only thing he wanted was to help his father, who suffered a stroke before the pandemic that left him without that ability. Iván Ramírez, CEO and co-founder of Robopedics. With that illness Iván had a shock of reality. After the stroke came dependency, the slowness of the system and the frustration of seeing that the technology did not seem to be made for cases like his father’s. “He only had one leg affected, but all the solutions were for two.” That’s how it is. The solutions that we usually find on the market are bilateral clinical devices that are designed for spinal cord injuries. These exoskeletons are striking, but they have many limitations. The first, the price, which usually starts at 100,000 euros. The second, the weight: they do not weigh less than 20 kg and make handling complicated. In fact, Ramírez points out, current solutions barely have any scope: although it may seem more because of their popularity in the media, only about 500 units are sold a year, when there are more than 20 million people who would need them. Ramírez decided to build from scratch a unilateral bionic device (“it is not an exoskeleton,” its creators insist) that would be capable of helping those who had lost unilateral mobility after a stroke to walk. Ramírez tells us without drama: “during the first four years I was alone. I took notes from my degree, tutorials, papers, I went to events… I learned as I went.” Iván had the help of the medical staff who treated his father, for example, but the technological solution was entirely in his hands. Without resources or equipment, he began to design and test his first structures from home, with basic engines. “I thought it would be a three-afternoon project, and I spent four whole years on it.” And then something happened. His father died during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the blow was tremendous. “Ramírez kept the prototype in the storage room and forgot about it for months.” But then, “by circumstances and coincidences,” he confesses, he met his co-founders, Dionís Guzmán and Marc Serraand decided that this device could become a commercial product. One that would help improve the lives of many people, even if he would not be able to help Iván’s father. Get up and walk This is how Robopedics was born, which little by little developed its current solution, Awake. Until then, Ramírez explains to us, existing exoskeletons were bilateraldesigned for people with spinal injuries or who cannot move either leg. This engineer soon understood why there were no solutions for those who only had one leg affected: it was much more difficult. With two robotic legs there is always one resting on the ground, making balance and control easier. But with only one, the system has to coordinate the robotic leg with the patient’s healthy leg, which does not have sensors or assistance. “Doing it with one leg seemed simpler, but it was just the opposite: without instrumenting the healthy leg, everything is much more complex,” he explains. The result was a lightweight unipodal exoskeletonwith adjustable telescopic joints and an electronic system curiously based on a Raspberry Pi in its industrial model. The idea not only reduced costs – key in a market where prices are skyrocketing – but also opened the door to more accessible and modular manufacturing. With the start of the business project, Iván and his partners added physiotherapists and neurological rehabilitation specialists to the team. Sandra Torrell, a team physiotherapist who has been working with stroke patients for years, explains how in the initial tests “we saw that the device really worked. There were patients who arrived tired and left walking straighter, more confident. And that change was maintained over time.” The device has already passed the technical development and laboratory testing phases, and is now entering the clinical trials stage to achieve medical certification. This approval, in which they have spent four years, has been long but, curiously, fruitful: by having to meet the demanding medical requirements, the product “is much better than it was at the beginning of the process,” confesses Ramírez. In fact, if everything goes as expected, Awake will be available in Spain in the second half of next year. And subsequently the idea is to expand the market, first in the European Union and then in the rest of the world. For this expansion, Robopedics has been closing successive rounds of investment, raising two million euros in the past, to which another million more is added in a new recent financing round and another 700,000 euros that they hope to raise in an imminent round. Among its key partners, Iván Ramírez highlights, are the Mondragón group as the main investor, in addition to Erreka as in charge of global manufacturing. To develop the product they have worked in collaboration with the Valencia Biomechanics Institute and The CT Engineering Group. The funds are used, for example, to achieve regulatory authorization as a class IIa medical device and thus be able to launch it on the market. How does Awake work… and how much does it … Read more
