Isowalk Partners With Karten Design, Adds Med Device Veterans to Executive Team
Next-Gen Smart Mobility Aids To Feature User Experience By Renowned Medical Design Firm; Company To Expand Clinical Focus
Los Angeles, CA, November 10, 2015 (Newswire.com) - Isowalk, a digital health startup focused on gait-mapping mobility assistance, today announced a development partnership with the award-winning design and innovation consultancy, Karten Design.
The Company also announced the addition of two medical device industry veterans to its executive team: Roderick de Greef, who will fill the position of Chief Financial Officer, and Raymond W. Cohen, who will serve as a member of the Board of Directors.
Isowalk is a unique platform to demonstrate our ability to create positive experiences in healthcare.
Stuart Karten, Principal, Karten Design
Karten Design is one of the premier medical, consumer and digital health product design agencies in the US, with 30 years of experience focused on human-centered design. The firm's Principal, Stuart Karten, is a celebrated thought leader in the creation of health and medical devices that inspire positive engagement with users. Karten Design's expertise will be manifest throughout the Isowalk user experience, including design aesthetics, user interfaces, engineering, manufacturability and corporate branding. Mr. Karten has also joined Isowalk's Board of Directors.
Clinical Visibility For Gait Health
The Isowalk mobility aid can present gait integrity as a quantified and qualified "sixth vital sign." The technology combines a biomechanically and orthopedically optimized walking assistant with a gait capture and analysis system originally devised by the UCLA Wireless Health Institute. Isowalk's gait mapping can quantify medical outcomes, track patient progress, make intelligent recovery predictions, monitor user compliance, and provide doctors, therapists, caregivers and researchers with powerful new insights; all while helping end users walk more easily and safely.
"We're thrilled to be working with Karten Design to bring forward the next generation of mobility assistance," said Isowalk founder and CEO Ron Goldberg. "Karten’s ability to harmonize functionality, usability and aesthetics into engaging health and medical solutions is renowned throughout the health tech industry, and their philosophy of creating products that are motivational and non-stigmatizing is directly in line with our own. We look forward to a fruitful partnership."
"Isowalk is a unique platform to demonstrate our ability to create positive experiences in healthcare," said Stuart Karten. "Our mission is to create health solutions that eliminate fear and embarrassment for the user—that users actually want to use. Isowalk transforms the lowly mobility aid; not only through its digital and biomechanical innovations, but also through the emotional touch points it creates of confidence, ease and self-sufficiency. We're delighted to be working together on this important healthcare breakthrough."
Isowalk Adds Medical Device Industry Executives
Isowalk's two new executive team members each bring to the Company more than thirty years of experience in the medical device industry, with particular expertise in identifying market opportunities, clinical and regulatory strategy, financing, mergers and acquisitions, investor relations and strategic planning.
New Isowalk Board member Raymond W. Cohen currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors of Axonics Modulation Technologies, Inc., a venture-backed developer of advanced neuromodulation devices. Mr. Cohen also currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Lombard Medical (NASDAQ: EVAR), Chairman of BioLife Solutions (NASDAQ: BLFS), and as a member of the board of Spectrum Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:SPPI). Mr. Cohen is a former CEO of Vessix Vascular, which, during his tenure, was acquired by Boston Scientific Corporation.
Isowalk's new Chief Financial Officer Roderick de Greef brings to the Company thirty years of experience in raising capital and financial management in the medical device industry. Mr. de Greef is a partner of MedTech Advisors, Inc., a financial and strategic consulting firm focused on the medical device industry. Mr. de Greef was previously the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Cambridge Heart, and has also served as a member of the Board of Directors for Endologix (NASDAQ:ELGX), and as EVP/CFO for Cardiac Science, Inc.
Clinical Focus
Isowalk's partnership with Karten Design, and the additions of Mr. Cohen and Mr. de Greef to the executive team, both reflect the Company's focus on gait data analytics for the clinical and rehabilitation markets.
Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are now designating 28 cardiac and 9 orthopedic inpatient surgical services and procedures into a bundled payment system for healthcare delivery. This includes the new Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CCJR) initiative, which makes mandatory the submission of medical outcome data. Current methods for collecting this data are typically based on patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), which are crude, time consuming, inconsistent and subjective.
Isowalk's gait capture and reportage can provide doctors, hospitals, rehabilitation centers and coordinated care professionals with an autogenetic method for tracking, recording and analyzing gait performance throughout the CCJR's 90-day event definition. By way of these innovations, both the patient's progress data and the doctor's required outcome data can be populated automatically, with unprecedented granularity and accuracy.
In addition to monitoring and quantifying recoveries from acute medical events, the Isowalk mobility aid can track gait integrity through long-term chronic conditions and among the elderly. Beyond its active walking assistance for the end user, Isowalk's analytics and alerts can provide remote family caregivers with a powerful new tool for mobility assessment, including fall prediction and alerts. Each year in the US, 1 in 3 adults age 65 and older suffers a fall, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These include over 47,000 older Americans treated annually in emergency rooms, from falls directly attributable to their mobility aid. Among these older adults, falls are the leading cause of both fatal and non-fatal injuries.
About Isowalk:
Based in Los Angeles, CA, Isowalk is a digital health startup focused on intelligent mobility assistance, featuring gait mapping and analytics for acute and chronic conditions. Isowalk Inc. is comprised of thought leaders from the worlds of orthopedics, medical devices, data science, consumer electronics, and the Internet of Things.
About Karten Design:
Karten Design is an award-winning product design and innovation consultancy passionate about creating extraordinary experiences between people and products. For 30 years, the company has helped leading consumer product and medical device companies seize new opportunities, build their brands, and generate revenue by designing and developing beautiful, easy-to-use products that resonate with end users.
About UCLA Wireless Health:
The UCLA Wireless Health Institute encompasses an interdisciplinary group of experts and innovators from many University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Schools, including Engineering, Medicine, Management, Nursing, Public Health, Athletics, and Law.
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