Transferring rehabilitation technology to markets: Lessons learned in the past ten years

Abstract

Ageing societies demand efficient rehabilitation technologies that would increase the productivity of rehabilitation of movement disorders while at the same time decreasing the number of clinical staff. This would appear as a perfect opportunity for related industry, however, one needs to note that the market for rehabilitation devices is fragmented, segmented and often fall under regulatory constraints of each individual country. Therefore, ideas for new devices often also require creation of a new market for a particular device. This means that time-to-market is rather long representing a substantial financial burden, which also makes a process of transferring new ideas into products through either establishing a spin-off company or setting-up a licensing agreement rather unique in each particular case. In this talk our experience on developing rehabilitation devices for balancing during standing and walking as well as for training sit-to-stand maneuvers and movement of upper extremities and transferring them to markets will be presented.