ATDev’s 5-pound Reflex robotic rehab device enables PT at home, addressing therapist shortages and improving patient adherence rates.
New medical devices are hitting the market almost daily, improving the lives of patients living with a myriad of conditions.
When Owen Kent, co-founder of ATDev, realized that no device existed yet to overcome the challenges he, and many other patients, faced every day with traditional physical therapy, he was inspired to create the Reflex Robotic Rehabilitation Device.
Founded in 2020 and spun out of UC Berkeley, ATDev is an assistive technology company developing an ecosystem of robotic personal mobility devices.
“I was born with muscular dystrophy, and I have used a power wheelchair my whole life. For people with my condition, you need ongoing and regular PT. That is really hard to get for a variety of reasons. One is insurance reimbursement, which is a problem we are not yet able to solve, but also logistically it really takes a lot of time,” Kent told MD+DI.
“An hour PT appointment, when you’re in a wheelchair, you have to find a driver, get in and out of your wheelchair, what might be an hour-long appointment turns into 10 to 15 minutes of actual therapy. I had recently gotten a robotic arm and was using it to do range of motion on my own body, and I thought, maybe there was a way to re-optimize PT.”
Kent used that robotic arm as inspiration for Reflex, a telehealth-enabled rehabilitation device that features remote monitoring, remote guidance through a personalized PT exercise program, and biometric monitoring to offer a personalized rehab experience for every patient using the device.
The device is not only telehealth enabled, serving as an extension to traditional at-home PT, but it is also light and manageable for patients, weighing just five pounds. Currently, other market alternatives are bulky, cumbersome, and impossible to lift for many PT patients.
“Right now, the at-home PT market has a few major players. You have home health PTs that go into the home, but now, less and less insurance is paying for that, and also there is a shortage of PTs who are able to provide that care. There are less people going into that space, but there are more patients as the population ages,” Todd Roberts, CEO and co-founder of ATDev, told MD+DI.
“Then you have some legacy devices, the most common one being the continuous passive motion devices, which were all the rage in the 80s and 90s. These are 40-50 pound devices that do range of motion, but there is no active component so patients were allowed to passively use it. So you saw a high range of motion, but very low strength. Patients could not stand up and get mobile in the home. On top of the measurement and calibration aspects that our device is able to do at home, we also provide active strengthening with guided robotics, which is our big step over CPM machines. Our form factor is also lighter and easier to use. A lot of users are either bound to a wheelchair or are older and more frail, and our system is only five pounds. An 80-year-old woman can easily move it around her home and choose where she wants to use it.”
Kent emphasized how this lightweight smart device will help to complement the role of a PT, especially now, when employee shortages are rocking the space.
“We really view our tools as an extension of the PT. This is not something that will replace PT, but it is designed to enable PTs to multiply their output by multiples of 10 or 20, which is very important. Just from a demographic standpoint, we are seeing a lot of shortage of PTs and a lot of people are not able to get care simply because of that. This is a new tool in the PT’s belts,” he said.
So far, just over 70 Reflex devices have been delivered to patients, and so far, Kent and Roberts are pleased with adherence rates. This device helps to actually track a patient’s output, strength, and frequency of doing their exercise, as opposed to traditional patient self-reporting, which may lack accuracy.
“On our 70 deliveries, we are seeing pretty good adherence rates. Rates higher than what you see from just sending people home with a piece of paper,” Roberts said. “The number one clinical problem to solve is that when someone is not around, people do not really do their exercises. And doing something is better than doing nothing. The first thing we want to show is increased adherence, and then maybe we will show patients recover faster with robotic rehabilitation.”
While so far, no clinical data has shown that at-home robotic rehabilitation can match or exceed outcomes from classic, in-clinical therapy, or other at-home non-robotic alternatives, that research is part of the next steps for ATDev.
“Caveating this by saying that today, we do not have clinical data saying we are better than traditional, home health therapies, but that is the goal, and we hypothesize that the product will achieve that. The goal with the product right now, the key thing, is that when a PT provider comes to your home, they are bringing their experience to the home, but they also get to know where you are on a given day. You could be more sore than the day before, or even more sore or swollen from morning to afternoon,” Roberts said.
“One of the key things our device does over other at-home solutions is the calibration step. You start by putting the device on, you move through your own comfortable range of motion, and we measure where your range of motion is and we block the system and measure what the strength is under your own power, so that sets a baseline for exercise for the day. You are able to move against those values, up to limits set by your PT. You are working between your level of comfort to wherever the PT wants you to go. That can be then updated remotely, so the patient can continue to progress at home and if things are not going well, they can go to the clinic and figure out what is going on or what the device cannot figure out.”
Beyond Reflex, ATDev has another exciting development in its pipeline- a next generation, robotic assisted wheelchair.
In November, ATDev was named as a subcontractor for the Robotic Assistive Mobility and Manipulation Platform (RAMMP) program, awarded to the University of Pittsburgh under the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) for up to $41 million.
RAMMP aims to create a new generation of open-source robotic assistive mobility and manipulation technologies that empower people with disabilities to live more independently, combining advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and digital twin simulations.
“We will work with seven different university partners and community partners on this $41 million contract to develop robotic wheelchairs. If you think about an AI-powered wheelchair, it can be a lot more collaborative with the user. It can also incorporate things like robotic arms, semi autonomous driving, which is really exciting. That really fits into our company mission of improving mobility and helping people stay independent at home for longer,” Kent told MD+DI.
The RAMMP project, which will be run by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, will collaborate with Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Northeastern University, Purdue University, Kinova Robotics, LUCI Mobility, NVIDIA, and Amazon Web Services. ARPH-A is a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“Our ultimate goal is to create an ecosystem of devices that can help patients stay independent at home, no matter their level of physical function. We have tools like Reflex, which is for short term use, and we see future iterations of that for things like walking assistance, and all the way at the other end of the spectrum we have our robotic wheelchair project for people with severe physical limitations, but allowing them to still stay totally independent in the home and in the community. That is the goal,” Roberts said.
With over 70 patients already benefiting from the Reflex device and ambitious plans for AI-powered wheelchairs on the horizon, ATDev is not just developing products, but they’re building bridges to independence for millions of people with mobility challenges.
“This is a really exciting space and physical AI has really enabled these technologies to get to market a lot faster, and also be a lot more effective. From an investment perspective, robotics has always been viewed as really hard, because it is really hard. But thankfully AI is allowing technology to develop faster, so this is a really exciting space and we are excited to be a part of using AI to solve problems and have a tangible impact on people’s quality of life,” Kent said.
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