Left: Top of Gait Project X with Raspberry Pi; Right: GPX pictured with pressure sensor in the bottom of the shoe
Closing the Loop
Keith Reilly, ’20 (Business Major, Social Entrepreneurship Concentration) is another team member on the GPX project. His initiation into the Makerspace occurred his Sophomore year when he took an “Innovation Through Technology” course. “We were going through the ideation phases of that class, working toward effectively taking a piece of technology and essentially “close the loop,” which was to send data up, but then also be able to receive it,” he recalls. “Our project at that time was effectively just one single piece of technology, what we would call a sprint, which was to be able to send data up to IBM Watson and receive a tweet back, reading out the temp of a temperature sensor.” After the success of the project, Keith was asked to be an advisor in the Makerspace, paying it forward by helping other students learn the technology. “This idea of a student consultant, [is] where I would guide the teams and show how the technology works, and how it could be implemented,” he says. For GPX, Keith was responsible for understanding how the various technologies fit together and how everything could be applied to hold some kind of business value. Taking guidance from what he is currently learning in an “Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy” course through MIT, he interviewed multiple stakeholders to understand how the project could positively impact not only health professionals (Physical Therapists, Osteopathic Physicians, etc.), but also third party entities such as insurance companies. For instance, Keith spoke with the owner of AtlancticProCare in Portland who said there is an associated “increase in costs for writing claims because everything they submit to the insurance companies is considered subjective,” Keith explains. The sales executive he spoke with at UNUM confirmed that “everything is done as accurately as humanly possible. So when subjective claims are made, doctors need to be double checked… to make sure [their report] actually lines up with what care they think would be necessary.” Therefore, Keith concludes that “the solution of GPX isn't necessarily that these technologies are just transformative by themselves, but they are transformative in the way that they allow doctors to codify something that was unquantifiable before.”
Student Doctor Donovan experienced this fight with the insurance companies firsthand, and the pressure to see more and more patients in the same amount of time. She recalls evaluating her patients’ gaits: “I would spend at least 15 minutes watching them walk… with this device, rather than us trialing and me trying to do it with my eyes, we could have real data points to see if we're making a big difference.” GPX could potentially shorten the time and provide quantitative data that could both be used in a patient’s treatment plan, and satisfy insurance companies at the same time. “Eventually what we want this to do is for my patient to walk down and have [the device] spit data out at me,” she says. “Then we can compare how much we improve their ability to walk, their gait pattern, and we can track them over time.” In just a short span, the team has made vast improvements to the project, and have plans to incorporate other software to increase the