HIHI’s February spotlight company is Brace with their innovative digital health platform which empowers social injury rehabilitation
Health Innovation Hub Ireland’s February spotlight company is on Brace and their innovative social injury rehabilitation platform.
This month HIHI launches our latest Clinical Evaluation Study with Brace an Irish digital health startup which empowers users on their injury rehabilitation journey. It’s unique as it combines community motivation, collective insights, and gamification to enhance adherence to recovery plans. It helps the user stay on track when recovering from injuries. In fact the company’s co-founder Conor Motyer, founded the company following a traumatic knee dislocation while playing hockey.
Brace tackles the fundamental challenge in rehabilitation, that the majority of the process is spent away from the practitioner, so there’s a huge reliance on the buy-in, self-management and discipline of the individual towards their own health and recovery. However, research shows the overarching emotions felt by people during the rehabilitation process are isolation, anxiety, loss of identity and low motivation. When you combine these challenges, it leads to average adherence rates to home-based recovery programmes below 30%. This low adherance results in poor clinical and mental health outcomes for the individual, a greater burden on the healthcare system, and treatment challenges for practitioners .
Brace aims to improve rehabilitation engagement by empowering the end user through their community-based recovery app. Users can create their plan from Brace’s exercise library or access the plan allocated by their physiotherapist, and set reminders, goals and programmes for completion. As they complete their rehabilitation programme, they can share and celebrate their progress within the Brace community, with educational content and gamification features designed to keep them engaged and motivated. Brace crucially also supports the mental journey with wellbeing tracking and support features, to assist with user growth and resilience, and flag early warning of issues.
Data from the World Health Organisation shows that 1 in 3 people would benefit from consistent rehabilitation, there’s huge potential to support population health through a platform that has a focus on engagement and wellbeing at the core, while also improving the efficiency of practitioners.
HIHI facilitated three separate feedback sessions with nine clinical experts in rehabilitation. The access and work HIHI delivered provided critical target demographic data through user engagement and practitioners informed value data points. New distribution channels were identified through the roadmap of results. This clinical evaluation was delivered by HIHI Ireland as a partner of the Smart D8 population health and well-being initiative.
Brace received positive feedback from all clinicians interviewed. Going forward this application is likely to be used by patients who are already highly motivated and eager to engage in rehabilitation, such as athletes, which Brace is now focusing on for the next stage of their growth. Brace could also expand past physiotherapy and may be utilised by other healthcare professionals such as speech and language therapists.
Conor Motyer, Co-founder and CEO of Brace highlighted the benefit of working with HIHI.
“HIHI were an invaluable support to Brace during our clinical validation study, both in terms of their guidance through the process and the access they enabled to top healthcare practitioners across Dublin. The insight we gained from this study provided a roadmap for both our initial target demographic and our go-to-market strategy. We are extremely grateful to HIHI for their collaborative support throughout the process and the great work they are doing to support startups like Brace and promote health innovation in Ireland.”
Brace has built and launched the public beta version of the Brace app on both the Apple iOS and Google Play App store which has received extremely positive user feedback and testimonials showing how Brace is making a real difference to people’s motivation and wellbeing during their rehabilitation journey. Following the successful demonstration of the benefits of the Brace app, the company was successful in obtaining two pilot partnerships in late 2023, with the IRFU.
Read the full case study here: https://hih.ie/downloads/case-studies/HIHI-case-study_Brace.pdf
Download and view the Brace app through the links on their website:https://www.bracesocial.com/