Kinematix working with English rugby champions

“In England they can only pay four million pounds in salaries, and so every time a player is injured they can’t replace him,” according to the CEO of this spin-off company developed by the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) and INESC TEC – the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering of Porto.

It was through a common contact that the company, formerly called Tomorrow Options, started using its device, the Walkinsense, in English sports. The device monitors, in a real environment, the movements of the body’s lower limbs and the distribution of the weight on the soles of the feet. Paulo Santos stressed that this work also makes it possible to quantify the time that the players spent doing repetitive movements so that they can change their training plans accordingly. Furthermore, the company’s work also detects problems that can be solved by customising the insoles of the shoes in order to, for example, alleviate the pain or try to balance the biomechanical differences between both legs.

In October the company decided to open a branch in Boston after convincing Portugal Ventures to fund the project with 2.6 million dollars (1.9 million Euros), adding to the 2.4 million dollars that the same venture capitalist had already invested in 2008. According to the 49-year-old CEO, the next step is applying the company’s methodology to American football.

Other than the Walkinsense, the company also developed the Movinsense, which measures the position and the time that bedridden patients stay in certain positions, avoiding sores or falls. The Movinsense is already certified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In the largest world economy, the Portuguese start-up believes that the ObamaCare programme will “benefit tremendously” from the company’s technology, which promises, for instance, to reduce costs with prolonged hospital stays.

Created in 2007 as part of the MIETE – Master in Innovation and Technological Entrepreneurship, Kinematix kicked off with five shareholders: an institutional (INESC TEC) and four individual shareholders. Other than Paulo Santos, other people involved in the original technology are a colleague of the Master’s degree and two professors. Close to 90% of the engineering is still being developed in Porto, while the hardware is being produced in Poland, Portugal, Spain and China.

New product to choose the best sports footwear
Kinematix has just launched its third product – the FittinSense –, a device that will help sportswear buyers to choose the most suitable shoes. The device was launched by the end of last year in Austin (in the United States) and it’s already being tested in some stores. “The main goal is to sell the product to large chains or brands with over 50 stores. We are now negotiating,” the CEO added, stressing that “this is the only equipment that makes it possible to obtain the information inside the shoe.” “Today, sportswear is very technical or segmented, and in a matter of minutes, this technology makes it possible to compare various pairs of shoes and obtain a visual result on which are the most balanced shoes for the way each person runs,” he explained.

Jornal de Negócios, 25 March 2014