INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Kaia Health, a self-styled digital therapeutics& startup, has pulled in $10 million in Series A funding for an app-based approach to chronic
pain management.
The idea is to offer an alternative to painkillers, using mobile technology to deliver what the founder describes as
multimodal, &mind body therapy& for musculoskeletal (MSK) disorders — comprised of guided physical exercises, psychological techniques and
on tap medical education.
&Once you fall into this category of you&re a chronic pain patient, and not just you have acute pain for two or
three days, then this is the best therapy to do,& says co-founder and CEO Konstantin Mehl
&But at the moment because this therapy is so expensive only 2% of the patients who should get access to it actually get access to it and
the other 98% of patients are treated with treatments against acute pain, like painkillers and surgery… This is why there this crazy cost
explosion when you look at the costs in the healthcare systems.&
The 2015-founded startup has developed a personal trainer app that uses
computer vision technology so it can act as a fully autonomous exercise coach.The app works by visually monitoring the user as they perform
exercises (via their smartphone camera), enabling it to keep track of repetitions and also provide vocal feedback — to correct posture and
motion.
The idea is to offer a more accessible and less expensivealternative to the one-on-one in personphysiotherapy whicha person
suffering chronic pain from a MSK disorder might otherwise use to manage their pain — such as by visiting a dedicated pain center for
weeks of guided treatment
However as Mehl notes that can be prohibitively expensive and also entail long wait times to get seen.
Kaia first focus has been on back
pain which Mehl knows plenty about — having suffered himself for two years
His struggles to find effective and affordable pain management were the inspiration for setting up the company, he tells us.
The goal he
shooting for with Kaia is to democratize access to proven multimodal therapies and reduce reliance on pharmaceuticals — pointing to rising
use of opioid-based painkillers, including in the U.S., where reliance on the drug has been driven by over-prescription leading to an
epidemic ofaddiction and rising numbers of overdose deaths.
&Most treatments against chronic back pain are just crazy expensive and crazy
Which is a weird combination,& he says
&There a lot of people out there who don&t know how to cope with their pain.&
Kaia approach addresses &the root causes of chronic pain&,
according to Mehl, though he concedes it cannot claim the digital therapy will cure everybody, saying: &That just not realistic.&
Though he
emphasizes &you can definitely reverse chronic pain when you have a low or medium chronification level& via therapies Kaia app is designed
to deliver digitally — as happened in his own case, albeit in person at a pain center.
He also suggests digital therapeutics can provide
greater support than even a dedicated pain center can because many patients don&t feel comfortable or safe carrying on doing exercises at
Whereas an app coach offers an &opportunity to control yourself all the time, 24/7&, which is really what chronic pain patients need.
&We
track every point on your body
And that the cool thing about us — that we can give you feedback on a millimeter basis of what movements you do wrong if you want,& he
adds, talking up the advantages of using computer vision rather than wearable sensors to monitor physical exercise
&At the moment we have more of a problem that we give too much feedback; that people complain about the app never stops correcting me!&
Last
summer another startup, Hinge Health, announced a $26M Series B round for another drug-free platform-basedapproach to managing
musculoskeletal disorders
Though its approach involves not just an app but wearable sensors and also some one-to-one health coaching — delivered remotely but by an
actual human, rather than Kaia fully automated, sensor-free AI coach.
Mehl says it experimented with wearable sensors but found many users
were reluctant to use them so decided to focus fully on a system of visual monitoring, feeding user data into continued training of the
machine learning algorithms — getting to a level with the motion control that it very happy with around two months ago.
&We had one
exercise already one year ago — a squat — so we released a standalone app which we called the Squat Challenge, just to see how people
are able to use this technology
And then the challenge was to just track all different body positions
So that took another six months to add all body positions
And now recently, since six weeks, we are able to track all body positions
And now we can basically correct any exercise.&
&We are a very scalable solution,& he adds
&That so important for us because [Hinge Health] charge a lot of money per patient, so they maximize the dollars per patient, which is a
typically thing you do in the pharma industry
Which I&m totally against
Because then we repeat the mistakes of pharma companies to artificially limit the access again, right
So we want to democratize the access to this best in class therapy and not build these artificial barriers to access.&
The Series A round
was led by Balderton Capital which says it excited by the potential for Kaia to build a platform for a family of pain intervention tools —
flagging the startup research around conditions such as the lung disease COPD, and potentially even Parkinson&s.
In a blog about the
investment, Balderton partner James Wise writes: &The platform Kaia Health is building has the potential to extend well beyond back pain
By combining clinical levels of research with longitudinal tracking and computer vision expertise, they are becoming a platform for any
intervention where pain can be relieved through regular clinical observation and guidance.
&Rather than just giving patients another way to
connect to a carer, Kaia Health has utilised the most powerful and prevalent tools we have to provide clinically effective health
treatments, at a fraction of the cost, and freeing up physiotherapists time for more meaningful interactions
It an exciting antidote to the Baumol cost disease, and one we hope will change many people lives.&
Kaia has around 250,000 users at this
stage, via a b2c solution as well as organizations in Europe and the U.S
which make its app available (such as via medical insurance).
The new funding will be put towards scaling up in the U.S
especially with a new office for New York City, with Mehl saying they want to flip the current usage ratio of 80% Europe; 20% U.S.
It also
plans to fund further clinical studies — including longer follow up studies, running to 24 months (vs the three, six and twelve month
studies it has already done).
A peer-reviewed, random controlled trial study of Kaia approach is also pending being published in a leading
journal, according to Mehl.
