Alfons Carnicero played basketball passionately and had thought of dedicating himself to improving the performance of athletes through engineering. He changed his mind in the last course of industrial engineering at the UPC as a result of a stroke that his father had. She accompanied him to the rehabilitation sessions and, he explains, became obsessed with biomedical engineering “to help people in that situation to regain mobility”.
He participated in university research on exoskeletons, completed a master’s degree in biomedicine and gained experience at a medical device manufacturing company in Germany. He was returning to Barcelona with a job offer. Then in 2017 he received a call from the professor of the Polytechnic Josep Maria Font to get involved in the development of an exoskeleton prototype that had gained momentum thanks to aid from the CaixaImpulse program. It was a difficult path in the face of the security of a salary, but Alfons decided to take it. “My parents thought I was crazy,” he recalls, but the challenge of going from a laboratory prototype to a device that could be used by any patient in rehabilitation was too powerful.
In the summer of 2018, he contacted a colleague from the university, Alex García, who worked in robotics, and managed to convince him, during a conveniently arranged dinner, to embark on the creation of a company with Professor Font. Both were 26 years old. In October of that year, Able Human Motion was born. Located in the Barcelona Activa technology park, in Nou Barris, the workforce now consists of 21 people. In more than five years they have not sold a single screw, but they have obtained 4.4 million euros of public funding (mostly from the EU) and 1.5 million private investors to persevere in the development of the his creature
They have manufactured seven prototypes, each one better than the previous one, and 200 patients have been testing them, with the collaboration of the Guttmann Institute, the Heidelberg University Hospital (Germany) or Asepeyo de Sant Cugat. Finally, it has been shown that the product brings benefits to rehabilitation. Last week the revolutionary Able Exoskeleton received CE marking under the new and extremely demanding Medical Device Regulation (MDR), the requirement to be able to start marketing the device, indicated for spinal cord injuries level 5 and below.
“It is the lightest exoskeleton for rehabilitation – it weighs 17 kilos compared to the competition’s 30 -, the patient can put it on or take it off autonomously by adjusting it to their physical constitution in less than 7 minutes – others ask 20 minutes – and the price drops from the normal 150,000 euros to 80,000”, describes Carnicero. “The price reduction is very important. If we go to the rehabilitation section of reference public hospitals such as Vall d’Hebron we will see that they use rudimentary elements like 50 years ago, such as parallel bars. They have orthopedic tools, but they don’t integrate robotics, and one of the reasons is the price.”
Six patents protect the Exoskeleton’s innovations in terms of lightness and ease of use, the most important of which is a very compact transparent electric actuator that allows to dispense with (expensive and faulty) sensors for coordinating the movements of the machine and the person. This product is for rehabilitation only: “With many repetitions with the robot the recovery is faster. Also in the case of the chronic patient, it is beneficial in terms of health to be able to stand up and walk a couple of times a week”.
The company will deliver the first five units in June in Madrid (3), A Coruña and Holland, and five more at the end of the year. At the same time, he is conducting a clinical study with multiple sclerosis patients and has begun work on an exoskeleton for private use that could see the light of day in 2026. “Much lighter – 14 kilos – and much cheaper than current models, which drops from 100,000 to 30,000 euros”, Carnicero says. Next year, a clinical trial will begin in Holland, with ten patients at home. “It wouldn’t be a substitute for being in a wheelchair all day, but it would allow for a couple of hours of physical exercise a day. “The first thing they tell you is that they like to see asses. They will be able to look people in the eye again, and that is very healthy, physically and psychologically.”
