Virtual-Reality-Therapie with CUREO®

Katharina Kittelberger

Startup Stories

Often, traditional therapy methods do not show the desired progress in rehabilitation. In some cases, they even have the opposite effect, as they tire and demotivate patients. To make therapies more attractive, the med-tech startup CUREosity, founded in 2018, developed CUREO, a clinic-ready VR therapy system that revolutionizes traditional therapy with gamification. 

Hereby, our ecosystem startup based in Düsseldorf, Germany, supports people with sensorimotor and cognitive impairments in rehabilitation. With CUREO, many problems can be solved, such as delayed start of therapy, shortage of specialists, too low therapy frequencies, high documentation effort and missing cross-sectoral observation of the therapy process. 

In an interview with 5-HT, Jannik Schmitz, Business Development Manager, provides exciting insights into the development history of the healthcare startup and what goals the team would like to achieve in the future.  

Jannik Schmitz, Business Development Manager, of the healthcare startup CUREosity

How would you explain your solution in three sentences to a professional colleague from the 
health sector?

"CUREO is a virtual reality therapy system used in the treatment of neurological and musculoskeletal disorders. The system combines innovative VR technologies and scientific knowledge. Thanks to immersion in virtual worlds, multisensory feedback and gamification, patient motivation is promoted, while at the same time therapists are relieved by innovative functions."

For rehabilitation after stroke, accident or neurological disease: Virtual-Reality-Therapie with CUREO®

What problem motivated you to start the company? 

"Just a short moment can turn life upside down, suddenly movements are no longer feasible as usual. One of the founders of CUREosity, Thomas Saur, experienced such a fate with his family. A car accident left his son, then still a baby, paraplegic. The other two founders share similar fates. For example, Stefan Arand's son suffers from Down syndrome, and Marco Faulhammer's partner suffers from multiple sclerosis. They quickly realized that the existing rehabilitation methods were monotonous and not very promising and wanted to use the potential of new technologies to make therapy exciting and varied again."

The different CUREO® modules are structured progressively and can be adapted to the individual needs of each patient. Various levels of difficulty can easily be adapted to the patient's abilities

How do you convince a pharmaceutical company, a health insurance company or another potential client to set up a pilot project with you?

"Our system offers various possibilities to improve medical patient care and clinical structures.

As a digital solution to problems such as delayed start of therapy, manual and time-consuming documentation work and the inefficient use of the few available therapists, we always meet with great interest.

The potential of the system is demonstrated by use cases and integration in various institutions and prizes such as the German Innovation Award. We also have use cases for health insurance companies for active savings with the same or improved medical care.
Accordingly, we are always ready to impressively prove the promise of our system in projects."

The virtual reality therapy system CUREO 

Who are your current customers (groups) and who do you want your potential customers to be?

"Our current B2B client groups we serve are rehabilitation clinics, hospitals, retirement homes, outpatient practices and doctors - basically any area of life where some form of activation/therapy is needed. As our system has been developed based on globally applied treatment methods, a worldwide scaling into the above mentioned customer groups is possible. 

We are also already active in various countries, for example in the DACH region, Finland and Sweden, the Netherlands, Slovenia and the United Arab Emirates. A nationwide integration in Europe is planned for this year."

Where do you see yourself in 3 years and how can 5-HT support you?

"Within the next few years, we would like to further develop our VR system by adding new functions. Internationalization is also on our agenda: We want to make CUREO known worldwide so that as many patients and therapists as possible can benefit from our solution. Currently and in the future, we will also conduct many more studies to explore further areas of application. Joining 5-HT helps us in generating new cooperations and exchanging ideas in the network." 

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