This story is part of a BostInno series, ‘Inno on the Road,’ that explores innovation communities around New England. Stay tuned this week as we explore Portland, Maine. Next week we’re headed to Western Massachusetts, and after that we’ll take a trip to New Hampshire.
When pet diagnostics veteran Patricia "Pat" Panaia became the chief executive of Kinotek last year, she issued a warning.
"Look, I don't know if we can do this, but I'll give it my best shot," she told the board of the Portland-based digital health startup, which uses motion-capture technology to assess human movement.
Shortly after, "We had 30 people that said, 'I'll buy it,'" she recalled in a recent interview.
That initial response was just the beginning for Kinotek, one of the companies that observers of the Portland ecosystem named a startup to watch. Nowadays, in its first year in operation, Kinotek is nearing $400,000 in annual recurring revenue, has grown its team to 15 with three new sales representatives and is seeing fast adoption in the fitness space.
Kinotek got its start in 2018 after "these students at the University of Maine had an idea," as Panaia put it.
The students were Justin Hafner, a former college athlete, and David Holomakoff, a bioengineering and biomedical engineering grad. The pair started working on a better way to use technology to visualize the human body, initially meant for students of kinesiology — the study of human body movement — as a study tool.
In its current iteration, Kinotek's system captures a variety of human movements through a single camera that uses laser light to measure depth: an example of so-called LiDAR technology, or Light Detection and Ranging.
Kinotek's secret sauce is what happens after that initial data gets stored into the cloud: the team used AI to develop a "pose estimation model" and visualize even the parts of the body the LiDAR camera could not capture, resulting in an analysis estimating the subject's overall movement health.
The result of the analysis, Kinotek argues, could be extremely helpful for professionals assessing patients' health after a physical injury or sports coach monitoring athletes' progress. The final report produces a 3D avatar modeled on the subject, and a time series graphs showing the quality of the movement over time. Possible takeaways from the report range from pinpointing areas where movement is restricted to looking at asymmetries and movement compensation trends within the body.
"You'll never see your body in the same way after you see it through this," Panaia said. "We could do five movements for you in less than a minute and the results would be ready in a minute."
Panaia said that one of her biggest contribution to Kinotek was the idea to present the final report like a medical readout of bloodwork, showing a reference range that could make the data easier to grasp. When she joined Kinotek, she had over 25 years of experience at two of Maine’s largest publicly traded companies and pet health behemoths: IDEXX Laboratories Inc. (Nasdaq: IDXX) and Covetrus (formerly known as Vets First Choice).
Kinotek is currently offering its product to medical, sports and fitness clients. The faster adoption is in the fitness space, Panaia said. Customers include Orlando Health, a Central Florida health care provider that adopted Kinotek in its outpatient rehab centers, and Lake Nona Performance Club, an Orlando-based fitness center using Kinotek to give new members a baseline movement health screen, according to Panaia.
"We have on our roadmap the ability to extract this information, the same information today, using any smart device," she said. "Imagine what we can do with that."
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