Prevent Falls in Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's & Elderly

We assure patients, a personal therapist or clinical provider with a simple, clear and concise prevention program through objective insights that would otherwise go undetected, whether it is a patient with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) or Parkinson’s whose disease is progressing or an elderly person who is at increased risk of falling. In the event of increased fall risk, the user and their caregiver / clinician are proactively notified and prepared so they can take measures and create strategies preventing a potentially catastrophic fall.

In the UK, the cost of falls to the NHS is estimated at over £4 billion per annum(1), with the majority of costs due to hip fractures in elderly persons.

Falls are the leading cause for visits to emergency rooms amongst older people, with up to 25% of falls resulting in injury(2).

In the US, over $50 billion is spent annually on medical costs related to falls(2), and these costs continue to rise each year.

Falling can result in pain, injury, loss of confidence, loss of independence and increased mortality. Furthermore, current techniques for assessing fall risk are highly subjective, as they typically rely on qualitative observations of gait and balance by health care professionals.

1. UK Government, Office for Health Improvement and Disparities. Falls: Applying All Our Health. 2022 Feb 25.
2. US Government, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cost of Older Adult Falls. 2020 Jul 9.

Patients place the smart insoles in their favourite pair of shoes – and then forget about them. Every time you go for a walk, your smart insoles collect data on your gait; this data is securely transmitted to the Celestra Health cloud where AI algorithms are applied to gain insights into your walking patterns and balance. Our algorithms establish a baseline for each user, from which we can detect even the slightest changes. In some cases, the user’s walking may improve due to physiotherapy and rehab; in other cases, their walking pattern may show signs of deterioration. Celestra Health can even detect walking events such as foot drops and stumbles, or identify specific walking phenotypes (for example, MS patients often exhibit spasticity, due to a tightness in their leg muscles that prevents them from maintaining smooth, controlled limb movements and increases their risk of falling) or detect when the patient is using an assistive walking device.

While smart watches and smart phones are widely used for tracking health and exercise-related data, there are limitations when it comes to tracking walking patterns using a device that is attached to your wrist or is in your back pocket, jacket or knapsack. While Celestra Health makes use of movement data available from your smart watch and/or smart phone (if available) to increase the accuracy of its insights, neither smart watches nor smart phones are able to capture gait data with the same level of accuracy.

At Celestra Health, we have worked closely with patients to ensure our wearable device fits into their lives as seamlessly as possible. Our smart insoles are invisible to others, as they are fully hidden within your shoes.

A barrier to collecting laboratory-grade human movement data is that it is expensive, time consuming, and requires highly trained personnel to collect and analyse the data. Whereas the Celestra Health solution unobtrusively collects gait data as the user goes about their daily routines and can predict deterioration in the gait and help predict and prevent falls. This approach avoids over relying on a single set of measurements taken on a single day, wherein the data can be easily skewed depending on whether the patient is having a good day or a bad day. By collecting 15-minute walking samples 3x per week, Celestra Health’s solution smooths out any day-to-day variations and thus presents a more reliable and objective measurement of the user’s gait and how it is changing over time.

Medical studies have shown that the calibre of data collected by our smart insoles is equivalent to the quality of data that is available from a multi-million-dollar gait lab; we refer to this concept as “gait lab in a shoe”. We have designed our solution to be as intuitive and user-friendly as possible, and are continuing to work closely with patients in Europe and North America. We are also working with a world-class team of neurologists from Harvard, Bart’s Health (one of the largest NHS trusts in the UK) and The Ottawa Hospital in Canada.