Digital physiotherapy company raises funding of $4.6 Million
Sword Health brings in a digital physiotherapy solution that aims to equip patients to be treated distantly in their homes. It will reduce the operating costs also.
Sword Health, a digital physiotherapy company, has brought in a whopping investment of $4.6 million during a seed funding, backed by Green Innovations, Vesalius Biocapital III and several other investors from the US and Europe, whose names were undisclosed.
The startup situated in Portugal has come up with a digital physiotherapy solution that aims to equip patients to be remotely treated within the comfortable confines of their homes. The company, in a statement released, stated that it intends to use the new capital investment, in addition to the earlier received investment of $1.2 Million from the European Commission, to fuel the development of cutting-edge digital therapy technologies.
They seek to bridge the divide between the demand for physiotherapists and the short supply, by delivering high-quality physical therapists combined with the heightened use of analysis of data and expert systems, directly to the patient’s home.
This in turn, also enables a significant reduction of operational costs.
The technology is designed to employ Artificial Intelligence in order to understand the patient’s needs and to provide feedback and responses during the course of the treatment and facilitate the remote guidance of clinical groups. The Sword Phoenix platform encompasses a myriad of components. The users are equipped with a motion sensor and tracker, that the patient wears, which connect them to their digital therapists.
This AI supported platform then provides the patients with feedbacks and verification on whether they are exercising the correct way. Finally, the platform comes with a portal where clinical teams can remotely glean detailed analysis of a patient’s progress and rehabilitation.
The Sword Health solution aims to meet the worldwide shortage of physiotherapists. They wish to make physiotherapy more scalable with interactive rehabilitation exercises and supervision of remote physiotherapists.
The basic idea was to use motion sensors that were attached to appropriate places of a user’s body, combining it with an intelligent user interface that takes the motion data of the patient as input and provides instant responses.
The founders Virgilio Bento and Marcio Colunas said that they plan to use the latest funding to further expand the clinical validation of the digital therapies, sales and marketing efforts. They said that they wish to extend and develop novel technologies in the physical therapy domain.
Co-founder Bento stated that they understood first hand from personal experience the need to have an efficient, affordable and reliable therapy service to loved ones and this was the strong motivation towards initiating the novel concept of remote therapy sessions and digital physical therapists.
The company states that the patients can use the Sword Phoenix platform independently with real-time responses during the therapy sessions. The clinical teams will be able to evaluate in detail their patient’s injury and performance and prescribe new programs to their patients remotely through Phoenix portal.
The Sword Health’s announcement and investment come at the right time as such digital home therapy platforms have become popular among the digital health space.
Image credit: Sword Health
