Virtual-Reality-Therapie with CUREO®
Katharina Kittelberger
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.
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."
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."