Miri Berger, 6Degrees - Converting Human Motion Into Digital Commands | LSI Europe '24

Miri Berger 00:02
Hi everyone. My name is Miri Berger. I'm the CEO and co-founder of 6Degrees, and 6Degrees' dream is to revolutionize rehabilitation, making it fun, smart, and accessible for everyone. All right, so we are talking about a field that has 2.4 billion people around the world needing rehabilitation due to musculoskeletal injury, and if we look specifically at the US, there's a shortage of 70% of physical therapists. This means that a very personalized one-on-one interaction or treatment has a lower chance of seeing a patient because people are limited by time and physical need. What we come to do is to bridge the gap between that need by offering personalized physical therapy that's adaptive for the user and allowing clinics to grow their revenue and access while keeping quality of care.

So talking about the market opportunity, it is a $120 billion market opportunity that starts with a focus on treating phantom limb pain, reduction of pain through physical therapy, and grows to other complex trauma and from there stroke recovery. To just give you a little bit of an idea, there is an amputation every three and a half minutes and a stroke every 40 seconds. All of these people will need one-on-one, intense, long-lasting rehabilitation that is, in the best case, a few months long and could be a lifelong challenge. And that's where we come in. We're looking to revolutionize this through a system that we've built that's fun. It learns about the user's ability of motion and translates what it's learned about that motion and the use of the system to both people engaged in treatment, both the physical therapist and the patient.

The system is comprised of our wearable device MyMove, which is embedded with an algorithm. It only takes five minutes to onboard into this algorithm. This means it takes five minutes for the algorithm, using a Chrome or Edge app or a game, to learn about your ability of motion, your range of ability, speed, dominance, involuntary motion, and other aspects. After that, five minutes to compare it to anything smart, in this case, a VR system. What we've done is we transposed the form of mirror therapy, which is the common standard of care for phantom limb pain reduction, into games—into two very engaging, very fun, very informative games. And they're not only informative in the way that the user plays the game; they're also informative in the surrounding information of the amount of pain they're in, the amount of opioids that they've taken now and throughout the week, and their engagement with the treatment, and their wanting to get a connection with the caretaker.

Now, all of this happens in a compliant, HIPAA, anonymous way, which is connected to the electronic patient file through the hospital, allowing both the patient to get that care and the physical therapist to keep that tracking and that personalized attention without being physically in the room. So talking a little bit about the power of gamification, just to give you an idea, we, around two months ago, saw a VA double amputee that came to a VA center to use this technology. He said he has immense pain. His only intuitive is pain medication. He put on our system. It was the first time mirror therapy was ever used for double amputee treatment of reduction of pain. He finished it and said, "This is the most fun I've ever had." Now this is a clinical setting, and all he could talk about was sharing the Oculus link with his family so that they could see that he has legs and he's having fun playing a game.

If you can imagine a world where people are having fun and engaging, not only with the experience but with each other, and having like a role model through severe rehab is really important. Someone a few steps ahead of you is really important, and that's what we can offer. On the patient setting, on the clinical setting, obviously you could see, instead of one-on-one in 40 minutes, which is a typical mirror therapy session, one-on-six in 20 minutes in clinic. The options are limitless, remote, and really have something—somebody that you can compete with on one end, but the clinician can also compare groups of patients going through the same kind of treatment procedure.

Now, as I said, we've engaged with the VA. We're doing a clinical study with them. We've also completed one with Sheba, the largest medical center in the Middle East, one of the 10 best ranked by Newsweek, and we've had amazing results. The results show a substantial reduction of pain adherence and others. Just to give you an idea of what I've been talking about for the last four minutes, this is what it looks like, if you can turn on this.

Miri Berger 05:30
What I'm smiling about is the last person to put this on. I was playing the music game, and we asked him—somebody asked him, "What do you see?" And he says, "I'm in the park. I'm going to perform in a concert." The music you heard is the music from the game. So just give you an idea of a little bit of the experience and the soccer game. We're using things like haptics to let people feel the grass with a leg that doesn't exist as they're moving in the game, as they're about to kick a ball with a leg that, again, doesn't exist in real life, but they can completely be confident that it's there in the game.

So as I said, clinical results. We compared it to mirror therapy. We showed it as good as in reducing pain. We used a VAS scale and a McGill scale to show activity and pain comparison, and it reduced it in 88% of the cases. We've also shown long-lasting results, meaning six months after the session or the session of treatments is over, six months past that, the reduction of pain maintains. That means that people don't renew their cannabis subscription or switch to opioids like over-the-counter simple pain reduction opioids. We can also show that the PT managed more people in that clinic. This is a little bit of what the VA is saying about us. We're really excited to work with them, looking at aspects of how much people are inclined to use this technology, how afraid they are. This is feedback from someone who's 65 plus, and he said he has no other alternative. As a double amputee, within 20 minutes, he has a full reduction of pain, which maintained around 30 days after this treatment.

Our go-to-market is really on one end, gaining further clinical validation, which is like we're doing with the VA, but not only in phantom limb reduction, but also complex trauma of lower limb as well as stroke. We could do that with the VA, with the current research, where we are looking to expand to additional design partners with that focus. Our business model is hardware as a service. Basically, we offer a kit for the treatment. The hospital can have some of that kit, which is, let's say, the VR device. And with that kit comes a number of seats. Seats are the data aspects to contact the patient remotely, and then you can get either a supportive kit or additional seats. An average clinic has around 30 physical therapists, and we see this model going to—we have some history comparing this to around $214,000 ARR per medium-sized clinic.

Now, why am I doing all of this? So we started the company because it's myself and my husband, who I met at 19 as an injured veteran with a severe nerve injury. From 19 to today, I won't tell you how long has passed, but basically, we've gone through every process of decision-making through having a severe trauma, which is, how am I going to concentrate? What am I going to study? How am I going to work? How am I going to go uphill to my house, and what am I going to do with the kids? You know, next Tuesday? How well can I function and concentrate? And how long can I stay in that situation? Basically, he describes it as having a friend tapping on his shoulder saying, "Hey, notice me. I'm here." And that's what every single person with pain is kind of dealing with. We kind of want to take that person and put him in the corner, let him relax, and kind of free your state up for recovery and function.

We're a very engaged and enthusiastic team full of clinicians, people who have managed over 17,000 individuals, people from SAP and Microsoft and others. So we really have the full support of organizations like Google, as well as our investors, who are really enthusiastic in the fields of AI, wellness, and health, and we're inviting other partners, as I said, to join. I thank you very much for listening, and I hope that past listening, you take this as a chance or as an opportunity to reach out and see if there's a way that we can collaborate. Have a great conference. Thanks.