Munich Startup: Who are you and what does Medicalmotion do?
Sven Klimpel, Medicalmotion: Our vision is first-class medical knowledge accessible to everyone We want to offer a solution tailored to each person's individual health condition and daily habits. We support people in leading healthier lives and doctors and therapists in providing more effective treatment.
Staying healthy into old age, living a healthy life without pain. My brother Tobias Klimpel and I made these statements our life's and our company's purpose: to empower people to live their healthiest lives. We both suffered from chronic pain in our younger years that rippled throughout our bodies. Sometimes it was back pain, sometimes jaw or shoulder pain, and then knee pain while jogging. Since conventional medical approaches couldn't help us, we became frustrated and looked for other solutions to get healthy.
Transferring engineering thinking to the healthcare system
As trained engineers, we now apply our engineering thinking to the healthcare system in interdisciplinary collaboration with physicians, scientists, and therapists. In therapy, the focus has primarily been on the points where it hurts, but rarely on the body as a whole. If this approach were applied to car repairs, only individual parts would be repaired or replaced without considering the roadworthiness of the entire vehicle. That's unthinkable! Unfortunately, given the time pressures of daily practice, physicians and therapists rarely have time to change this.
But with digitalization and the sensible use of artificial intelligence, we have the opportunity to make disease prediction and risk detection, as well as individualized prevention, an interdisciplinary medical standard. To achieve this, analog and digital healthcare work hand in hand.
Medicalmotion: Real-time exercise recommendations
Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?
Sven Klimpel: Currently, approximately 80% of the world's population suffers from body pain. To date, there is no method to recommend the best exercise(s) for each patient based on their specific disease(s), pain type, lifestyle, and physiology. Each individual patient requires an individualized 'dosage,' a kind of exercise medication. This should be different for each patient and adapt to changes in their daily routine.
If one could recommend exactly the right exercises for every patient, they would be able to treat their health condition correctly and thus change the effectiveness of their therapy. And that's exactly where our intelligent, CE-certified Medicalmotion app takes them. We've developed the most comprehensive pain solution in a single app.
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Sven KlimpelUnlike other digital therapies that focus on individual diseases and use static training plans, our digital solution provides real-time exercise recommendations. This helps with the treatment and prevention of more than 100 different diseases, including migraines, tinnitus, back pain, tennis elbow, osteoarthritis, and even heel spurs.
Furthermore, our platform connects interdisciplinary medical knowledge and data dispersed over many years. The result? The world's largest pain graph.
“We considered giving up”
Munich Startup: Has there ever been a point where you almost failed?
Sven Klimpel: Developing recommendations for individualized exercises was the most complex thing we've ever done. It took an incredible amount of effort. Theoretically, every person should have their own app, as there is so much individuality, complexity, and contraindication. There are billions of ways to recommend effective exercises to patients. Research results abound, but they are rarely conclusive and, even worse, often contradictory. After many attempts and thousands of hours of work, we almost came to the point of giving up. Despite many years of work, we considered simply giving up because it was the most complex thing we as engineers had ever seen.
But our team and our vision to help other people live better, healthier lives kept us going.
Munich Startup: How are things going?
Sven Klimpel: The coronavirus crisis has given a huge boost to digitalization in healthcare. After four years of developing and evaluating our knowledge-based system, we made our app available free of charge at the beginning of 2020 to support people during this difficult coronavirus period.
Since mid-2020, the Medicalmotion app has been reimbursed by health insurance companies across Europe. Currently, this covers around 1.7 million people. Furthermore, our app is recommended and funded by physiotherapists in a joint research project within the "Digital Health Future Region" of the Federal Ministry of Health.
In addition, thanks to the digital healthcare market in Germany, apps can now also be prescribed by doctors. This means we reach around 73 million people with statutory health insurance in Germany alone. Driven by our vision of helping people and supporting doctors and therapists in their daily work, we naturally strive to become a DiGA (i.e., a prescription-based app).
Huge networking opportunities in healthcare
Munich Startup: How do you rate Munich as a startup location?
Sven Klimpel: For us, Munich is one of the best locations in Europe. The networking opportunities, especially in the healthcare sector, are enormous with the companies based here. At the same time, the startup ecosystem has developed fantastically, and the density of venture capital is also increasing. We are happy to have our headquarters in Munich.
Munich Startup: Hidden champion or shooting star?
Sven Klimpel: Hidden Champion!
