A number of faculty researchers at Northern Arizona University (NAU) https://nau.edu have invented new technologies that have been granted patents. In 2020, NAU inventors were issued 19 patents, filed 41 new patient applications, and submitted 43 new invention disclosures.
However, because of the effort and investment involved, not many researchers have the resources to commercialize their inventions and launch start-up companies to take their technologies to the marketplace. NAU Assistant Professor Zach Lerner has successfully commercialized his invention to help adults and children with Cerebral Palsy (CP) and wants to enable other companies to follow with their own roadmap.
As reported, often disease and injuries to the neuromuscular system can lead to impaired walking ability. According to CDC 13.7% of adults have a disability that limits their mobility and nearly four in 1,000 children are afflicted with CP.
Many children with CP especially in rural communities, lack access to the basic treatment needed to prevent ambulatory decline which worsens as they grow older. Most existing treatment strategies have proven insufficient.
One of the most promising new treatment options for both children and adults is the use of battery powered wearable robots or exoskeletons, to provide home-based gait training and mobility assistance.
Professor Zach Lerner’s research funded through grants totaling $1.5 million from NIH https://www.nih.gov, NSF https://www.nsf.gov, and the Arizona Department of Health Services https://www.azdhs.gov, has focused on developing wearable exoskeleton devices.
For the wearable robot to be effective, it needs to adapt to the individual. Lerner and his team created an adaptive assistance exoskeleton control algorithm to establish and track personalized measures of exoskeleton assisted walking performance. The next step was to program a control strategy into the memory of the computer’s Central Processing Unit CPU mounted onboard the robotic exoskeleton device.
He then worked with NAU’s technology development and commercialization program called NAU Innovations https://nau.edu to submit a patent application. As Lerner made improvements to his inventions, the NAU Innovations team then submitted nine new patent applications with all currently patents pending.
The next step for Lerner was to explore ways to take his inventions to the marketplace. He pulled together a team and co-founded along with Ray Browning, the company BIOMOTUM https://biomotum.com. The company’s first prototype product internally named the RA2D is a robotic ankle assist device, lightweight and wearable. The powered device provides on demand gait training and is designed to grow with the child into adulthood.
Lerner and Browning are also focusing on raising money to fund their work To date, BIOMOTUM has raised more than $2 million in capital through a combination of private equity funding and federal grants through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program https://www.sbir.gov. As they gear up for the next phases of commercialization, Lerner and Browning see the potential to go global.