Alfons Carnicero played basketball and had thought about dedicating himself to improving the performance of athletes through engineering. He changed his mind in his last industrial engineering course at the UPC as a result of a stroke his father suffered. He accompanied him to the rehabilitation sessions and, he explains, became obsessed with biomedical engineering “to help people in that situation regain mobility.”
He participated in university research on exoskeletons, completed a master's degree in biomedicine and gained experience in a medical device manufacturing company in Germany. He returned to Barcelona with a job offer. Then, in 2017, she received a call from Polytechnic professor Josep Maria Font to get involved in the development of an exoskeleton prototype that had acquired flight thanks to help from the CaixaImpulse program.
It was a complicated path, faced with the security of a payroll, but Alfons decided to take it. “My parents thought he was crazy,” he recalls, but the challenge of going from a laboratory prototype to an exoskeleton that any patient in rehabilitation could use was too powerful.
In the summer of 2018, he contacted a university classmate, Alex García, who worked in robotics, and managed to convince him, over the course of a conveniently well-settled dinner, to embark on the creation of a company with Professor Font. They were both 26 years old. In October of that year, Able Human Motion was born. The firm, located in the Barcelona Activa technology park, in Nou Barris, now has 21 people. In more than five years he has not sold a single screw, but he has obtained 4.4 million euros of public financing (most of it from the EU) and 1.5 million from private investors to persevere in the development of his creature. .
They have manufactured seven prototypes, each one better than the last and 200 patients have been testing the developments, with the collaboration of centers such as the Guttmann Institute, the Heidelberg University Hospital (Germany) or the Asepeyo de Sant Cugat. Finally, it has been shown to provide benefits to rehabilitation. Thus, last week, the revolutionary Able Exoskeleton received the CE marking according to the new Medical Device Regulation (MDR), a tremendously difficult license to obtain that is the necessary requirement to be able to start marketing the device, indicated for spinal cord injuries. from level 5 and below.
“It is the lightest exoskeleton for rehabilitation – it weighs 17 kilos compared to the competition's 30 – the patient can put it on or take it off independently, adjusting it to their physical build in less than 7 minutes – others, 20 minutes –, and the price drops from the normal 150,000 euros to 80,000,” describes Carnicero. “The price reduction is very important. If we go to the rehabilitation section of leading public hospitals such as Vall d'Hebron we will see that they use rudimentary elements like they did 50 years ago. They use parallel bars. They use orthopedic tools but not integrating robotics, and one of the reasons is the price.”
Six patents protect the Exoskeleton's innovations in terms of lightness and ease of use, the most important of which is a very compact transparent electric actuator that makes it possible to dispense with sensors (expensive and with fairly frequent breakdowns) for the coordination of movements between the machine and the person. This product is only for rehabilitation: “With many repetitions with the robot, recovery is faster. Also in the case of the chronic patient, it is beneficial at a health level that he can stand up and walk a couple of times a week.
The company will deliver the first five units in June to centers in Madrid (3), A Coruña and Holland and many more until the end of the year. At the same time, it is carrying out a clinical study with multiple sclerosis patients and has begun working on an exoskeleton for private use that could see the light of day in 2026. “Much lighter – 14 kilos – and much cheaper than current models, going down from 100,000 to 30,000 euros,” Carnicero advances. A clinical trial will begin next year in the Netherlands, with ten patients in their homes. “It would not be a substitute for the wheelchair all day long, but it would allow for a couple of hours of physical exercise a day. “The first thing they say is that they are tired of seeing asses. They will be able to look people in the eyes again, and this is very healthy, physically and psychologically.”
According to Carnicero, robotics will become widespread in rehabilitation centers and devices for private use are the next step in its strategy of "democratizing technology, where the patient can pay for it out of pocket or, as is already happening in the United States, the insurer covers expenses because the fact that the patient can use an exoskeleton means a reduction in healthcare costs.
