FIGUR8 is a wearable and AI system for musculoskeletal diagnostics
Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Nan-Wei Gong, co-founder and CEO at FIGUR8, a wearable & AI system for musculoskeletal diagnostics.
Our overall goal is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screentreat and measure progress and outcomes. How we’re empowering the consumer. Whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down? And how tech advancements change the role of the doctor.
Highlights from the interview:
- FIGUR8 uses wearable electronics to quantify musculoskeletal health based on muscle function and joint motion. The technology was developed originally to help elite athletes understand why people get injured, and why there are players who can play well into their 40s. The concept started between the MIT Media Lab, the Boston Red Sox and Mass General hospitals in the early 2000s.
- To understand movement, 3D motion tracking technology was invented, which is now used to make 3D movies like Avatar. That’s not scalable for every point of care and regular people don’t have access to that type of technology. so FIGUR8 put it into wearable form, streaming the information about how the patient moves and muscles contract over Bluetooth to a mobile device. FIGUR8 reduces the cost and the time of 3D capturing by over 95%. It takes between 10 to 15 minutes to run a full movement analysis, which is fast enough to be incorporated into a clinical practice.
- FIGUR8 is not a treatment solution: it provides information for every type of injury. In the future, when its AI is able to start generating diagnostic results, it will become a diagnostic solution.
- The company’s primary customers are insurance companies that want to understand how to communicate value with providers. Providers will make suggestions and normally these types of suggestions and clinical notes in this category of medicine are very descriptive. So, the first use case is working on being a digital communication channel between the payer, the provider, and the patient.
- Workers compensation is 50% of an employer’s health spending in musculoskeletal health. It’s not managed with data, and decisions are made based o cookie cutter solutions, both in therapeutic and in diagnosis, and in claims decisions. Today, a case manager would make phone calls to get reports, because it’s very analog, but with FIGUR8, they get it immediately, which saves time and money.
- MSK is one of the largest spending categories in healthcare and the void FIGUR8 is filling is the lack of objective data sources. That’s how it set itself apart from the other players in digital MSK space because it is providing a solution to capture information to understand the best care pathways. FIGUR8 is setting up the standard for precision medicine and AI is the next step to enable this whole ecosystem to become better and smarter.
- The company doesn’t sell its devices direct-to-consumer at this point because the real value is to have the best data source and that’s paired with the clinical conditions. The company wants it to happen through someone that can give the patient the right suggestions, and show them how to use it. Going direct-to-consumer would mean sacrificing a lot of the complexity in the data set that it can collect.
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