Most handheld massagers on the market are intended to pound away at the user’s body without getting any feedback from its muscles, said Impact Biosystems CEO Bridget Hunter-Jones. Her company has developed an alternative that she believes will put them ahead of the competition.
Impact Biosystems is pairing its new massager with a handheld scanner that measures muscle tightness. Data from the scanner is sent to the company’s phone app, where users can get recovery recommendations, such as guidance on using the massager or stretching. These products are set to launch in May after more than 30 years of research and development.
“It custom curates either a warmup or recovery session personalized to you, and then it guides you through,” Hunter-Jones said. “It’s actually adjusting both the pressure coming out of the device as well as the duration on each muscle group.”
The company was founded in April 2020 by a team that includes Hunter-Jones; Craig Cheney, chief technology officer; Sonny Vu, chief commercial officer; and Ian Hunter, chief inventor and Hunter-Jones’ father. They raised a $2 million pre-seed round in 2020 and a $4.5 million seed round in April 2021.
While the company is relatively new, the technology development started decades ago in Hunter’s MIT laboratory. Alongside students like then–Ph.D. candidate Cheney, Hunter was developing a scanner that uses a series of mechanical pulses to gauge muscle tightness. The team began turning it into a consumer product over the last few years.
“The core IP is actually in the algorithms that we use to take out that muscle measurement from the current and amplitude measurements that we’re taking,” Hunter-Jones said. “We’re really confident that no one else is able to take this type of measurement today.”
Hunter-Jones has spent most of her career at audio tech company Sonos in consumer product design. When her father approached her about this new product, she was looking for an opportunity to work in fitness tech and build her own team, with more representation of female engineers.
As a runner and yogi, Hunter-Jones also appreciated the benefits of this technology for professional athletes and weekend warriors alike. For professionals, the massager could be an at-home supplement for a masseuse or physical therapist. For casual athletes, it could be their main recovery tool.
“[With other massagers on the market], they’re really concerned that they could be doing more damage on their muscles,” Hunter-Jones said. “We made sure that it was really easy to use, really easy to hold, lightweight, and then we really ramped up the guidance on the app.”
Hunter-Jones said the tools can help athletes recover efficiently, prevent injury and build muscle mass. The app tracks all this information.
The scanner, massager and app are available for preorder. The Pact Sport model will retail for $499 and includes a 6-month subscription to the premium Pact App. Pact Pro will cost $649 and comes with an 18-month app subscription. Both models come with varying types of massager heads, cases and batteries.
These products will pair with Apple Health and Strava at launch to give Impact Biosystems’ app more information on the user’s activity. Hunter-Jones said the company plans to look into additional partnerships with other recovery devices and apps.
“We can be taking in information on your nutrition, your hydration, your sleep, to be able to correlate all that with your muscle readiness metric,” she said. “With that extra information we’re able to give more personalized recommendations.”
