SANTA MONICA, CA / ACCESSWIRE / March 15, 2017 / Online Media Group Inc. covers Bionik Laboratories Corp. (BNKL). The idea of robots playing a role in day-to-day life has long been hypothesized through movies. While often entertaining, fictional and sensationalized examples of robots have obfuscated the view that robotic technology is already integral to many parts of our world, in manufacturing for example, and will continue to become more mainstream and lead to meaningful improvements in other fields, particularly healthcare.
Many leading companies and universities worldwide have research and development efforts centralized on improving mobility through rehabilitation robotics. Bionik Laboratories Corp. (BNKL), largely through its 2016 acquisition of Interactive Motion Technologies, has experience with many of these organizations, including the likes of IBM, underscoring the company compiling a robust data set from clinical trials involving more than 1,000 patients, commercializing three FDA-cleared products and working on a pipeline of four new products along the way.
Scientists and physicians have traditionally focused on repetition of a few functional motor skills to help a person recover from neurological damage, albeit from a stroke or other incident. Problem is, that conventional methods are slow and protocols hard to reproduce, resulting in limited success. Technology is reshaping this landscape, utilizing robotics, sensors and intelligent software to focus interactive therapy on neural plasticity and remapping damaged pathways to improve neurological function, muscle strength, coordination and more.
This presents an opportunity to address the growing need for new, efficient solutions for mobility-challenged people, while lowering the economic burden on already strained healthcare systems. To that point, the American Heart Association's Stroke Division and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs both recommend the use of robot-assisted therapy for upper extremity motor rehabilitation in stroke patients.
Bionik's suite of commercialized robotic rehabilitation products consist of InMotion ARM™, InMotion HAND™ and InMotion WRIST™, products that have been the topic of hundreds of peer-reviewed publications. In the pipeline, the company is working on lower-body technologies, including an exoskeleton called ARKE that leverages cloud analytics through a partnership with IBM designed for use across the healthcare/homecare spectrum; InMotion AnkleBot and InMotion Home, both of which employ similar technology to the marketed InMotion products; and Gait Trainer, a very early-stage product in development at MIT.