Kinesis Health Technologies Wins Start-Up Award in San Francisco

Dublin, Ireland, 28 July 2017, Kinesis Health Technologies, an Irish health technology start-up, has been declared overall winner of the Tech Day pitching competition, held during the 21^st International Association for Gerontology and Geriatrics (IAGG) World Congress which has just ended in San Francisco.

At the World Congress, which takes place every four years, over 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, entitled 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 9 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.”

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.

The company has also announced that Dan Maher has joined the Board of Kinesis as a non-executive director and advisor. Dan Maher has held multiple CEO, R&D, Operations & Marketing roles across a wide range of medical and information technology companies.

Seamus Small added, “We are delighted that Dan Maher has joined our Board of Directors. He brings with him a wealth of experience from medical devices to venture capital, across a long and successful career, and we look forward to the impact he will make on the strategy and direction of the company.”

“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,” commented Dan Maher.

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.

ENDS

28 July 2017

For further information contact Micéal Whelan, University College Dublin, Communications Manager (Innovation), t: + 353 1 716 3712, e: miceal.whelan@ucd.ie, or Dr Barry Greene, CTO, Kinesis Health Technologies, t: +353 1 716 5401, e: info@kinesis.ie.

Editor’s Notes

Kinesis Health Technologies is an award-winning health technology start-up company based in Dublin. Kinesis is a spin-out of a large ageing research centre, the Technology Research for Independent Living (TRIL) Centre at University College Dublin. The company’s patent-protected proprietary technologies are registered as medical devices and have been validated as part of an extensive programme of top-tier internationally peer-reviewed research. www.kinesishealthtech.com

The focus of the TECH DAY pitching competition was to bring the worlds of academia and tech start-ups closer together. A total of 8 start-ups presented a compelling 5-minute pitch on their investment ready company to a panel of expert judges. The pitch competition was hosted by AGE-WELL NCE and Aging 2.0, in partnership with the IAGG.

The other 7 companies which took part in the competition, in addition to Kinesis were; Agewell Biometrics (UK); Braze Mobility (Canada); care.coach (US); Ceresti Health (US); FallCall Solutions (US); Lava Group (Northern Ireland); LifeAssist Technologies (US) and Smart Brain Aging Inc (US). www.iagg2017.org  

NexusUCD, the Industry Partnership Centre, is located in Belfield Office Park, Clonskeagh, adjoining the main University College Dublin campus. NexusUCD offers high-quality modern office space, with short, medium or long term occupancy arrangements, and associated services to established innovation-led companies who are collaborating, or wish to collaborate, with UCD’s world-class research base. www.ucd.ie/nexusu