Portland startup merges smart apparel, augmented reality and health care

 

Meet Motusi—a client of Jon Summers, whose bringing ingenuity to athletic wear and training. Their solution… stylish apparel that tracks and analyses movement.

A new digital health startup is on a mission to change the way people work out, recover, and rehabilitate after injuries.

The brainchild of founders Marc Alexander and Jon Eng, Portland-based Motusi was founded in early 2019 with the goal of better capturing full-body motion to better predict injury while providing vital information to professionals by monitoring physical behavioral data.

Motusi offers smart athletic wear which transmits real-time movement data to a mobile app, allowing a coach, trainer or medical professional to monitor movement in a fully digital 3D model represented by an avatar.

Motusi’s growth has been supported by a big partnership with German engineering company Bosch, who developed the sensors in the startup’s athletic wear. The two companies along with third partner Unity Software showcased the product at the massive Consumer Electronics Show in January.

The company has been funded so far with a $1.5 million Seed round, raised at the end of last year. It’s currently pursuing a Series A round to scale and meet demand for its platform.

The company’s compression clothing has embedded sensors that accurately translate movement into data and performance insights that help professionals from physical therapists to occupational health and safety reps so that they can gain a better understanding of how subjects move.

“As you move, so does your avatar in 3D space,” said Alexander. “The movement content and data are extremely relevant to institutions seeking to better understand peak performance behavior and see clinically relevant metrics like joint-angles, dynamic center of mass, and forces on the body.”

The product is already in the hands of physical therapists, sports organizations and a “leading hospital chain.”

Health and fitness professionals can use the Motusi Move app, which records a subject's movements for evaluation on a smart phone, allowing them to rotate the subject’s avatar 360 degrees to get the full picture of their movement behavior.

“The person reviewing the app can see the subject through the Motusi Cloud, where all the subject’s movement data is stored,” said Alexander. “A subject can gear up and perform anywhere and remotely share their information with a professional through the Cloud. It's a new way to effectively communicate performance through our hybrid version of telehealth, allowing professionals to see what’s happening at all times.”

The pandemic helped redefine Motusi’s product design and was particularly helpful in allowing a variety of medical and fitness professionals to continue to serve subjects without being in-person. Physical therapists can view a patient's performance measurements through the avatar to see if they have been rehabilitating or managing injury correctly. Personal trainers can monitor someone’s form as they perform exercises to see if they are making improvements or setting themselves up for injury.

Motusi has 10 full-time employees and select contractors. It is hiring.

“We’re looking for skilled people to join our Portland team, who range from bio-mechanists and engineers to strategic client development, to tech operations and marketing,” said Alexander. “We moved our entire operations, manufacturing, and supply chain to the Pacific Northwest and have over eight separate suppliers, including women-owned businesses, helping us deliver our solution.”

The startup is tapping into the region’s strong software and hardware design legacies as well as manufacturing, higher education and athletics.

 
Samantha Gee