Nicholasville, Kentucky-based Active Therapy Systems provides virtual physical therapy to people with neurological disorders, a process that as it stands now is too burdensome, according to Bennett Gatto.
Gatto is the CEO and co-founder of Active Therapy Systems, a startup designed to help those with Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis and Alzheimer’s Disease. Gatto said insurance, travel and lack of access to a therapist makes the process of remaining in physical therapy difficult for these individuals.
Active Therapy Systems creates digital therapy for patients to use at home that is personalized to them. Each month, the patient will have a virtual meeting with their physical therapist, but Active Therapy Systems also allows them to receive personalized on-demand care throughout the month.
Each patient uses a large touch screen tablet which allows them to connect with their therapist directly. It also gathers patient data through wearable devices like a blood pressure monitor and a sleep mat tracker.
“We set them up with their workout plan or their exercise plan for the month based on the information that we gathered through those monthly telehealth sessions, along with the data that we're collecting on a daily basis,” Gatto said.
Physical therapy for those with neurological disorders is typically delivered in-person in limited sessions. Gatto said it’s limited due to insurance only covering a set number of sessions, and some patients don’t have the ability to travel to in-person sessions.
“Once it becomes too burdensome, once [patients] can’t sustain that, they drop off,” Gatto said. “So any improvements they make, they basically lose over the course of a month or two. They finally regress until they don’t have any other option.”
Gatto said that’s the flaw Active Therapy Systems is trying to fix — he said most of these exercises can be completed without a therapist present, as long as it’s monitored.
Active Therapy Service will pilot its tech in the first quarter of 2022 in Ohio.
Gatto has been aware of these issues since 2013, when he first started working with patients with Parkinson’s. As a student, he worked with a group at a neurological rehab institute in Mississippi.
“I was able to implement a lot of what I had learned down there, but then I also saw the problems that we’re trying to solve now,” Gatto said.
He started the company as soon as he was done with school, on a mission to fix this issue. He teamed up with co-founder David Zid and launched the company in 2017.
Gatto called Zid and Jackie Russell, director of research, the brains behind the Parkin’s side of the business.
It employs four engineers and a video editor. It also employs Don Skaggs for business development.
To date, the company has about $750,000 in total funding which includes NSF grants and Kentucky matching fund grants.
“Ultimately, we can help in the fight against some of these neuro-diseases and help understand them to a much deeper extent than we do now,” Gatto said. “Simply because we're going to be collecting data points on all of our patients every day, all day long, and that's something that no one else has right now.”
With all the collected data, Gatto said he hopes to improve not just the way the therapy is delivered but also learn what treatments are most effective.
Active Therapy currently provides online sessions through Total Healthworks — these aren’t the one-on-one individualized therapy classes but group sessions — to 180 paid members. Those users are located across the globe. Active Therapy is the parent company of Total Healthworks, and it offers both free and paid classes.
