Formsense Smart Ring to Quantify Rehab Outcomes in Stroke Survivors

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Formsense, a leading wearable technology and smart apparel company, has been chosen as technology partner for a $2.4M grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that includes an interdisciplinary team of world-renowned researchers in rehabilitation sciences.

Prof. Sunghoon (Ivan) Lee, a health informatician from UMass Amherst’s Institute of Applied Life Sciences (IALS) is the Principal Investigator of the grant, supported by Prof. Paolo Bonato and Randi Black-Schaffer from Harvard Medical School - and human-centered mHealth design expert - Eun Kyoung Choe from the University of Maryland iSchool and Human-Computer Interaction Lab - as well as Nathan Ramasarma, founder and CEO of Formsense.

This grant will help deploy and test a novel mobile health (mHealth) system, leveraging Formsense’s wearable sensor that slips on a finger like a ring, to monitor and encourage movement and activity in the weak upper limb of stroke survivors in an ambulatory setting. For several years, Formsense and its University partners tested the use of this novel solution validating its capability of monitoring both gross-arm and fine-hand movements clinically relevant to track and assess activities of daily living (ADLs) for affected patients.

“As a research-driven company, Formsense supports early and strong collaborations in academia in order to validate its technologies and explore commercial solutions that can accelerate adoption in the market,” says Ramasarma, whose San Diego-based company develops wearable sensor technologies that objectively measure human performance in health, fitness, and sport. “The vision of Formsense was always to improve the quality of people’s lives and the confirmation of this grant from the NIH is particularly gratifying to me and the whole team at Formsense.”