Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Healthcare startup devises unusual solution to senior fall risk: Wearable airbag

In 2010, there were 258,000 seniors aged 65 and older were admitted to the hospital […]

In 2010, there were 258,000 seniors aged 65 and older were admitted to the hospital with hip fractures, most of them from falls, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The cost of hospitalization and recovery amounted to upwards of $20 billion, according to Cleveland Clinic data. It’s a massive problem for hospitals that can’t discharge patients until they’re no longer deemed a fall risk. It’s also a driver of a rapidly growing industry around remote monitoring devices. But early stage healthcare startup ActiveProtective thinks it has developed a way to better protect patients, if not prevent them from falling, as CEO Drew Lakatos shared with me in a phone interview.

It’s a wearable airbag.

Dr. Robert Buckman, a former trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital and St Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, is the CTO for ActiveProtective. He invented a micro airbag designed to be worn around the waist that deploys to cushion the user’s fall. Before you begin to shake your head incredulously, it’s not an airbag that involves the pyrotechnics that car air bags use to deploy. Instead, the micro airbag uses cold gas inflation. The gas still rushes out very fast, but there are mufflers to reduce the sound as much as possible, lest seniors have a new cause to be alarmed. It’s also equipped with Bluetooth technology so it can trigger alerts to an emergency contact.

Lakatos, who spoke at TEDMED 2014 and was among the Hive companies, talked about how Buckman came to develop the technology. As a trauma surgeon at a city hospital, he got pretty used to seeing gunshot wound victims than most. But when he moved outside the city, he noticed that instead of gun shot wounds, many of his patients had suffered injuries from falls.

It sees its business model for the prototype-stage device split across business-to-business and direct-to-consumer customers. Lakatos said longterm care facilities and hospitals would have a strong interest. Patient falls are deemed preventable in hospitals and are classified as never events when they happen. Patient falls accounted for roughly 6 percent of never events in hospitals in 2009, according to data from the Joint Commission.

The company envisions consumers wearing the device, made of neoprene, in some sort of belt during the day and keeping it on their bedside table at night. “We see this device as a way to increase the aging in place trend,” Lakatos said.

So how did Lakatos come to be CEO of the company? He met Buckman through his wife, who was a student of Buckman’s in medical school and who had talked about his invention with her. His invention sparked Lakatos’ interest.

It is currently lining up pilot partners as it prepares to start a Series A round.

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