ProtoKinetics
Providing the gait-way to personalized healthcare through mobility measurements

Healthcare innovation is no longer optional. Technology-driven progression is required to make patient care more efficient, evidence-based and profitable.

According to the Healthcare Innovations and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) August 2018 study, healthcare providers and payers are committed to using advances in technology to redesign the healthcare experience to a value-based, patient-centric care model. Sixty percent of providers and payers are already prioritizing innovations that can drive operational and process efficiencies and improve the patient experience. However, there is a gap between these aspirations and actual achievable goals.

ProtoKinetics effectively fills the gap by efficiently capturing and contextualizing a patients’ gait and balance performance. Fundamentally, quantifying mobility is invaluable, it's the ideal linchpin upon which to build a patient-centric, value-based healthcare model. These data are so essential to patient health that gait speed is often referred to as the sixth vital sign.

ProtoKinetics is a leading developer of gait analysis and assessment systems that provide mobility metrics that matter. ProtoKinetics’ core product, the Zeno Walkway, quantifies walking measurements by describing the pressure, timing, and spacing of a patient’s footprints. Their simple to use pressure mat system and ProtoKinetics Movement Analysis Software (PKMAS) ably offers accurate, digestible, and powerful data output for a variety of gait and balance collection protocols.

ProtoKinetics’ solutions have served numerous health systems, universities, and government agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institute on Aging (NIA), pharmaceutical companies for clinical trials, and medical device manufacturers in both commercial and consumer markets.

Over the past two decades, gait mats have been utilized to capture and characterize timing and distance gait measurements in control and pathological populations, thereby illuminating disease driven phenomena throughout the disease stages. These measures are easily compared to normative values and limits of healthy peers.

Identifying the subtle changes in gait and balance before the onset of prominent motor or cognitive symptoms requires validated measurements and trustworthy protocols

While this technology is well established, ProtoKinetics continues to drive innovation by implementing and automating standardized clinical tests or protocols, revealing additional novel insights. COO Michael Rowling and his scientific research team, stay updated on all of the most recent peer-reviewed, relevant research publications while keeping track of newly introduced commercial products. This laser-focused approach has propelled ProtoKinetics into a leadership position of developing new protocols that will help define the future of mobility measurements.

“Identifying the subtle changes in gait and balance before the onset of prominent motor or cognitive symptoms requires validated measurements and trustworthy protocols. In light of the increasing use of multiple wearable sensors, non-specialists may find it difficult to identify which device constitutes an appropriate tool for clinical assessments versus devices that fall into the gadget category,” says Rowling. According to the FDA, validated measures are necessary because real-world data (RWD) and real-world evidence (RWE) play an increasingly important role in healthcare decision-making. Rowling asserts, “facilitating and optimizing patient-centered mobility performance is a win-win for all stakeholders: industry, payers, providers, and patients—thus making validated measures extremely crucial.”

Increased data, however, poses additional data management hurdles. PKMAS overcomes these by efficiently exporting data into easily ingestible formats for data storage and analysis. In several on-going longitudinal studies, researchers are characterizing the natural history of gait from infancy through older adulthood.

By following ProtoKinetics’ lead to accurately track gait and balance data within electronic medical records, healthcare systems can achieve their aspirations and goals of creating an efficient, outcomes-driven, patient-centric organization.