Chronic back pain (CBP) is common and the pain it causes can be a great burden on people's lives as the condition can cause reduction in their mobility and independent living. A crucial component of the management of CBP in clinical settings is verbal interaction between physiotherapists and their patients. Both parties take part in a conversation related to the back problems presented by the patient. The clinician begins by assessing the cause of the symptoms and devises a treatment plan to treat them. After treatment, physiotherapists carry out regular assessments to evaluate the effects of the treatment, including pain reduction and mobility improvements in the affected areas. Although some existing back therapy devices on the market offer treatment benefits, none of them offer the conversational interaction between clinician and patient during a consultation. As a result, the treatment offered to their users consists of a set of standard programmes, lacking any interaction or personalised approach. We are developing an innovative software system that enables the user and the back therapy robot to interact in a verbal physiotherapy consultation, offering users highly personalised therapy in the comfort of their own home. This innovation will be a game changer in the back care industry and create a global leader in the management of CBP and in digital health, based in the UK.

Chronic back pain (CBP) is common and the pain it causes can be a great burden on people's lives. A key outcome metric in the treatment of CBP used in clinical settings is soft tissue tension changes in the patient's back. Before and after treatment, physiotherapists carry out manual assessment to evaluate the level of soft tissue tensions in the affected areas such as the neck, shoulders or lower back. Although some existing back therapy devices on the market offer treatment benefits, none of them can monitor back tension changes. We are developing an innovative back therapy robot that can achieve this. By measuring back tension before, during and after the intervention, our innovation offers users an objective measure of the reduction in their back tension and the benefits of the treatment. Back tension is a data category that is not yet available to consumers on any meaningful scale. By measuring the evolution of our users' back tension during treatment, our innovation will allow our back care robot to create this new data set. That data can then feed into the software we employ to offer personalised treatment programs with the robot to users, allowing that treatment to be continually optimised based on the data. The result will be a back therapy robot that's smart enough to design the optimal treatment for your individual back, and then to keep improving that treatment based on an objective measurement of the changes in your back tension. This innovation will be a game changer in the back care industry and create a global leader in the management of CBP and in digital health, based in the UK.

Have you ever had a sore back or known someone who had one? If so, that's not surprising: "low back pain \[is\] the single leading cause of disability globally" according to the WHO and Public Health England [found in 2018][0] that "low back and neck pain was the leading cause of level 3 morbidity for males and females." We're addressing the disruptive impact of COVID-19 on access to manual physiotherapy for people with back pain, due to the requirement for close human contact during manual treatment which results in a high risk of infection. Our aim is to make personalised back care widely and above all safely available to all, regardless of race, colour, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation or age. Your back is different, everyone's back is different. That's why if you visit the physiotherapist with a back issue they will always carry out a detailed consultation. Our new technology will automate this crucial component of manual therapy using in-App consultation to interact with users and enable personalised treatment to be delivered by a robot. The founder of the company is a trained engineer and physiotherapist. Incorporating his physiotherapeutic know-how, our software will analyse the user's responses to offer over 10,000 different personalised treatment programmes, delivered by a robot controlled by the App. Our solution will deliver personalised, safe and effective therapy in the home. Our offering will provide as many sessions as users need for a monthly cost of around one manual physiotherapy session - making the regular treatment needed by those with chronic back pain affordable. We are a diverse team with the skills in project management, engineering, financial planning and software to make this project come in on budget and be a success. We believe our obtainable market is 33m people and £19.4bn annual revenue globally, including 2m people and £1.2bn revenue in the UK and 9.7m people and £5.7bn revenue in the USA. We target £26.6m revenue by 2026 and plan to create 49 highly paid, skilled jobs in the UK three years after completing our project. Our long term ambition is to be the leading back care company in the world, making interactive, personalised, high quality, affordable and safe back care available across the world. [0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-profile-for-england-2018/chapter-3-trends-in-morbidity-and-risk-factors#trends-in-morbidity-by-disease-group

"Pacla Medical is developing and commercialising Robo-Physio, an automated physiotherapy device for the treatment of back stiffness. Robo-Physio has 36 robotic fingers which gently apply force to move the spine to relieve back stiffness. The Company is currently manufacturing the first batch of Robo-Physios that have been pre-ordered by customers in the UK. This project will enable the company to take the product to the next stage of development, i.e. pre-production. In particular it will enable us to develop and incorporate into Robo-Phyiso sensors and spine mapping software to measure and control the force delivered by each of the robotic fingers to the spine joints. This means that the physiotherapy session provided by Robo-Physio can be personalised to the needs of each user and the progress that is being made in relieving stiffness in the spine recorded. We are confident that this will significantly increase the benefit of the Robo-Physio sessions to the users. We will work closely with all our users and collect their feedback and make sure that their experience of the product is fed back into the design and development process so that the users receive the best possible product. We will collect feedback from users throughout the development phase and use the feedback to optimise the product design. We will introduce the new product in 2019 in the UK and to export markets in 2020\."

"Pacla Medical is developing Robo-Physio, an automated spine massage device with 36 robotic fingers and accompanying software. When a person lies on the device on their back, the robotic fingers stimulate the back to relieve the tension. During the proposed feasibility study, the company will explore possibility of the development of a sensor system that measures stiffness changes in the back over a treatment period. Positive results of the project should lead to a full development of spinemap sensor system. Eventually, the spinemap sensor system will be incorporated into the mechanical body of Robo-Physio."

Established and incorporated in August 2015, Pacla Medical Limited based in Edinburgh is developing an automated physiotherapy device, Robophysio, which mobilises a patient’s spine to reduce spine joints stiffness and to relieve back pain. In the United Kingdom, back pain was identified as the most common cause of disability in young adults, with more than 100 million workdays lost per year. The costs of back pain in the UK have been estimated to exceed £1 billion each year, and globally to be more than £100 billion. Some 80% of these health care costs are generated by the 10% of patients with chronic back pain and disability. The Innovate UK’s global cooperation feasibility study will enable the company to enhance the current proof of concept prototype for Robohysio, and build working partnerships with other organisations both in the UK and across the globe to move the product into the pre-production phase.