Intro

Akina is a digital healthcare spin-off project from ETH Zurich.  So far, Akina was supported by the NCCR Robotics Spin Fund, Innosuisse, and Venture Kick. Lead by Florian Haufe and Michele Xiloyannis, two postdoctoral researchers with a background in robotics, AI and healthcare technology, the team is now pushing towards a market entry as a medical device in 2023.

Mission

Akina empowers rehabilitation patients to return to their active lives faster and more independently than ever before. Today, a staggering 80% of patients do not adhere to their at-home physiotherapy prescriptions, for a simple reason: training alone at home, with a paper printout as the only guidance, is just too boring. Akina’s gamified healthcare offering turns the current, repetitive exercise into a motivating and engaging experience.

Product USPs

Our product connects evidence-driven physiotherapy to people's favourite entertainment content through AI-powered software (patent pending). Patients can control well-known, existing video games and interactive video series with therapeutic movements. Through the novel therapy experience we offer, patient adherence to prescribed exercises dramatically increases, and recovery is up to four times faster with associated lifetime cost savings of more than 50% for insurance providers.

1. Embedding existing video games into medical therapy at home.
   We are convinced that current commercial games are unrivalled with respect to their motivational abilities, immersive character, and intuitive user experience.
   To transfer these benefits to medical therapy, we have designed an algorithm that enables users to control games with therapeutic movements.
   However, to select a gameplay/therapy scenario and get started, and for feedback after completion, users will need a natural user interface (NUI) that seamlessly integrates with the existing games functionally and aesthetically, but also accounts for the special needs of medical therapy.
   A prototype of such a NUI could be a deliverable for a student project.
   
   
2.  Creating a holistic concept for new vocabulary and application aesthetics that allows digital healthcare to be used in home environments.   
   Current home healthcare offerings often seem as if they were taken straight from hospital settings, with intimidating vocabulary, and a sterile, technical appearance both in applications and for the hardware.
   We aim to identify other domains (e.g. fitness, fashion, food, furniture, digital entertainment,…) from which we can borrow more suitable vocabulary and application aesthetics, and conceptualize a new framework using these for therapy at home.