Medicalmotion: Holistic App for Pain Treatment

Medicalmotion is a health start-up with an innovative, self-learning AI technology founded by doctors, scientists and engineers based in Munich and Madrid. Their technology makes it possible to assist in the prevention and treatment of currently over hundred different types of diseases. Originally founded by Tobias and Sven Klimpel, three more founders joined at a later stage.

Munich Startup: Who are you and what does Medicalmotion do? Please introduce yourselves! 

Sven Klimpel, Medicalmotion: Our vision is to make first-class medical knowledge available to everyone. We want to offer a solution that is tailored to each person’s individual health condition and everyday habits. We support people to lead a healthier life, and doctors and therapists to offer more effective care.

Staying healthy into old age, living a healthy life without pain. My brother Tobias and I made these statements our life and company purpose: empowering people to live their healthiest lives. At a young age, we both suffered from chronic pain that traveled throughout our bodies. Sometimes it was back pain, sometimes jaw or shoulder pain, and then knee pain again while jogging. Since the classic medical approaches couldn’t help us, we were frustrated and looked for other solutions to get better.

Transferring engineering thinking to the healthcare system

Now professionally trained as engineers, we are applying our way of thinking from engineering to the healthcare system in interdisciplinary collaboration with physicians, scientists and therapists. In therapy, most of the focus has been on where it hurts. But rarely on the wholeness of the body.

If this approach were applied to repairing a car, only individual parts would be repaired or replaced without considering the drivability of the entire car. This is unthinkable! Unfortunately, with the time pressure in everyday practice, doctors and therapists rarely have time to change this.

But with digitization and the sensible use of artificial intelligence, we have the opportunity for the prediction and risk detection of diseases and their individual prevention to become an interdisciplinary, medical standard. To this end, analog and digital care are working hand in hand.

Medicalmotion: Movement recommendations in real time

Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?

Sven Klimpel: Currently, about 80% of the world’s population suffers from body pain.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 a unique ‘dosage’, or a type 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 each patient, they would be able to treat their health condition properly and thus transform the impact of their therapy. And that’s where our smart, CE-certified Medicalmotion app takes them. We’ve developed the most comprehensive solution to pain in a single app.

Munich Startup: But that’s nothing out of the box!

Sven Klimpel: Unlike other digital therapies that focus on individual diseases and use static training plans, our digital solution provides real-time exercise recommendations. As a result, we help with the therapy and prevention of currently more than 100 different diseases, for example migraine, tinnitus, back pain, tennis elbow, osteoarthritis or heel spurs.

Moreover, our platform interconnects interdisciplinary medical knowledge and data that has been scattered over many years. The result? The world’s largest pain graph.

“We almost came to the point of giving up”

Munich Startup: Was there a point where you almost failed?

Sven Klimpel: Working on the recommendations for the individualized exercises was the most complex thing we’ve ever done. It was an incredible amount of work. Each person should theoretically have their own app because there is so much individuality, complexity and contraindication. There are billions of ways to recommend effective exercises to patients. Research results abound, though rarely conclusive and, worse, often contradictory. Therefore, after many attempts and thousands of hours of work, we almost came to the point of actually giving up. We considered just giving up, despite many years of work, because it was the most complexity we had ever seen as engineers. But our team and our vision to help other people live better, healthier lives kept us going.

Munich Startup: How is your business going? 

Sven Klimpel: The Corona crisis has given an enormous boost to digitalization in healthcare. After four years of development and evaluation of our knowledge-based system, we made our app available free of charge in early 2020 to support people during this difficult Corona period.

Since mid-2020, the Medicalmotion app is now reimbursed by health insurers across Europe. Currently, this is around 1.7 million people. In addition, our app is recommended and promoted by physiotherapists in a joint research project in the ‘Digital Health Region of the Future’ of the German Federal Ministry of Health.

In addition, the digital health market in Germany means that apps can now also be prescribed by doctors. This means we can 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 everyday work, we naturally aspire to become a DiGA (i.e. an app on prescription).

Huge networking possibilities

Munich Startup: What do you think about Munich as a startup location?

Sven Klimpel: Munich is one of the best locations in Europe for us. The networking possibilities, especially in the healthcare sector, are huge with the various companies located here. Simultaneously, 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.