SXSW Startups: LinkDyn Robotics
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 12, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Augmented and Virtual Reality, which will pitch at 3:30 pm Saturday, March 9, LinkDyn Robotics aims to commercialize human-interactive robotic systems. Based in Austin, LinkDyn provides innovative robot systems based on advanced force-control robotic technology that enables new human-robot interaction in VR applications with realistic force feedback, robotic rehabilitation with seamless assistance, and more.
Founder/Lead Engineer Bongsu Kim, Ph.D. shared some thoughts about the company’s plans.
What is your competitive advantage?
The LinkVR Robot product can deliver macro-scale forces in a VR environment that is unattainable by any other haptic device on the market, which all focus on local-scale small forces or tactile sensations.
What are your goals for LinkDyn in 2019?
We plan to launch the LinkVR Robot product in 2019.
The high cost of physical therapy and the rate of premature patient releases from rehabilitation helped to inspire LinkDyn. What are your projections for how affordable your products can be?
The goal of LinkDyn’s rehabilitation devices is to increase the efficacy of rehabilitation intervention, to help victims of stroke, traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury to regain as much capability and independence as possible.
LinkDyn’s robotic products, while projected to be cheaper than existing competitors, will still be expensive to providers and facilities due to the nature of the innovation that they are bringing to the landscape. However, several factors must be accounted for when assessing the patient’s perspective on cost effectiveness. First, more effective rehabilitation post-injury will lead to significant savings in medical bills over the long run. Reimbursement models for robotic rehabilitation from insurance providers, which exist in countries in Europe and Asia and are gaining traction in the US, will provide assistance and incentive to seek out robot-assisted rehabilitation for these patients.
Physical and occupational therapy after a brain injury is laborious and expensive, and physical automation on a larger scale has major potential to reduce cost of treatment compared to conventional therapy. Some studies find, in certain cases, robotic rehabilitation is already cheaper for patients even without insurance reimbursement despite the high cost of robots.
As adoption increases, (the market for rehabilitation is expected to increase dramatically from $641 million in 2018 to $6.4 billion in 2025 according to ReportsnReports), economies of scale can enable drastic reduction in prices.
Does your team anticipate putting programs in place to make LinkDyn’s products more accessible?
We have found in our customer interviews that rental programs are highly preferred to defer the cost of equipment over time. Reimbursement models, mentioned above, will be a major assistance in providing this care to patients as well.
LinkDyn’s Robotic Arm Platform emphasizes its adaptable technology and potential to be used for a multitude of varying functions. Was its original inception and design planned for a particular sector of advanced technology?
Solving real problems in rehabilitation was a major driver for our inception. From our experience talking with therapists, we believe that better robotic devices can solve many preeminent problems faced by patients and providers such as high labor-intensity and propensity for injury during physical therapy, the rising number of victims of stroke due to aging population needing to be served by a group of professionals that experience high turnover rates, and dissatisfaction with the level of recovery that patients get with current methods, among many others.
That led us to develop our technological platform, the LinkDyn actuator, designed for close interaction between humans and robots. The original usage was intended for the most capable and advanced exoskeleton robots for rehabilitation and assistance purposes, which drove the innovation in the cutting-edge technology. It addresses a major problem preventing adoption of robotic rehabilitation: ineffective, choppy, low-quality interaction with humans. The technology solves this problem by mimicking dynamics of natural human body’s movement by featuring compliant behaviors with precise force controllability comparable to the human arm. We found that this offered a compelling solution for training and simulation for many other areas beyond rehabilitation as well.
We initially developed capability for virtual reality and games because these provide incredibly important functional context for exercises as well as making normally tedious and strenuous exercises more fun and engaging. With this type of approach, which combines task-based exercises, more engagement, and more repetitions with the help of a robotic assistance built on neurological principles, we believe can deliver the best recovery for patients. In a similar vein, the very same technology with different training contents can deliver highly effective skills training for a variety of critical tasks such as surgery, maintenance and repair, machinery operation, among many others.
Where do you see the VR Haptic Robot being most relevant?
The first area we will like to see our robot utilized in is surgical simulation training. Force feedback is highly important in this field, and will increase training efficacy while maintaining the benefits of VR training: lower cost, more training iterations without volunteers/cadavers, and task-based training in a highly realistic simulated environment. Force and haptic feedback in this area is rapidly gaining popularity, but their capabilities are still quite limited. The LinkVR robot offers a compelling solution to the problem.
Tell us something about your previous experience at SXSW.
I have been to SXSW Interactive to showcase the result of my Ph.D. work, an exoskeleton robot HARMONY used for upper-body rehabilitation of stroke patients.
How and when did your team come together and please fill us in on any relevant startup experience?
Seonhwa Shin and I started the company following my Ph.D. work in 2016. In 2017, James DeBacker, who I had previously worked for three years while at University of Texas, joined the company from SwRI. In 2018, Jovita Ezeokafor also joined from SwRI.
Looking at the entire tech industry, what trend is your team most excited about?
We are excited about the advance of automation with AI and robotics technology including self-driving cars.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
