Changing physical therapy

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When a good idea comes along, Brian Reh has no problem saying “let’s do this,” even if it means years of research and, ultimately, the creation of a new company division. That is exactly how his company’s SafeGait 360 Balance and Mobility Trainer came to be.

“One of our marketing analysts came in my office and she said ‘I’ve got a business idea.’ She had a daughter who had a brain injury in a motorcycle accident and went through gait therapy, so learning to walk again,” said Gorbel Inc.’s president and CEO. “There was this gait belt and three physical therapists and a wheelchair. (She was) scared to death she was going to fall on her face.”

Since Gorbel—a Victor-based overhead material handling, lifting and industrial fall-protection company—already had technology that enabled the unweighting of objects for easy movement, the staffer asked, “What if we could use that to unweight people?”

Gorbel’s patented technology, called G-Force, is used primarily in industries that need to smoothly move heavy objects from Point A to Point B, with little effort by an operator.

The employee watched her daughter go through painful rehabilitation, and paid attention to the things therapists were doing, such as putting tape marks on the floor to measure the distance her daughter was able to walk, using stop watches to time her and clickers to determine the number of repetitions she did of certain things.

“And she said, I have seen so many things in this experience that I believe we have technology right now that can address and can advance what they’re trying to do,” said Betty Dolce, general manager of Gorbel’s medical division. “Brian was great. He said, do the research, write the plan, go out and find out if there’s a market for this beyond what you’ve just experienced at one facility.”

And as often as possible, Dolce said, Reh was involved in meetings and conversations along the way in order to gauge feasibility. Some of those meetings involved J.J. Mowder-Tinney, associate professor and department chair in physical therapy at Nazareth College of Rochester. Mowder-Tinney’s input and ideas were crucial to the product’s development, Dolce said.

But Mowder-Tinney was skeptical at first, unsure that the product would make it to market. It was a good idea, but for a manufacturer serving material handlers to make the leap into medical devices seemed a stretch.

Still, she agreed to meet with the team and was impressed by their persistence and desire to help others.

“And they were like, come out and meet with our engineers. I remember coming out there and going into a room where there were 30 engineers sitting around just asking me questions,” Mowder-Tinney recalled. “So I was like, you guys aren’t messing around.”

Following extensive testing and input from roughly 100 physical therapists and industry insiders, the SafeGait was installed at Nazareth and the product officially launched in 2015. Monroe Community Hospital has the equipment, as does University of Rochester Medical Center and the Ohio State University, Dolce said.

The SafeGait works to help both the patient and his therapist. The G-Force technology in the SafeGait can distinguish between intentional and nonintentional movement, Dolce noted, eliminating falls.

“With a very small amount of force the actuator that the patient is connected to will move with them. They can move horizontally along a rail. They can practice things that are essential in rehabilitation like moving from a seated position to a standing position, or navigating stairs,” Dolce explained. “It moves with the patient and keeps a constant tension on the strap that connects them to the device.”

And when the SafeGait senses that a patient is falling, it arrests their movement downward and allows them to practice recovering.

“That dynamic fall protection is proprietary to SafeGait,” Dolce said. “It is unlike anything else on the market, and it has been one of the key reasons that SafeGait has been chosen over other competitive devices.”

Because SafeGait can unweight an individual by up to 50 percent, the patient has fewer sets of hands on them. In a traditional physical therapy scenario, up to four individuals could be holding onto a patient to keep them steady.

“You now take that away and can create a one-on-one, therapist to patient interaction when you use SafeGait,” Dolce noted.

A year after launching the SafeGait, Gorbel developed its own harness; originally the harness attached to the equipment was purchased from another company.

“We recognized very early on that there were definitely things we could do to make it easier to use and more comfortable for the patient,” Dolce said. “And each year since we launched, we also launched brand new software packages.”

This year Gorbel will launch SafeGait ACTIVE, which will be intended for outpatient facilities.

“So it provides just a minimal amount of body weight support, but it still provides fall protection and it allows the patient to move with a lot more speed than SafeGait 360,” Dolce said.

The medical division is a growing segment, Dolce added, and the team is looking at mixed reality, which is a way of incorporating games into therapy that will engage a patient and get them to work harder. Additionally, Gorbel is looking at capturing vitals like heart rate and oxygen levels and integrating them into the SafeGait system.

Mowder-Tinney said challenging clients is one of the goals she and her fellow physical therapy professors have. Nazareth’s is one of the few physical therapy programs in the nation that has a consistent pro-bono clinic. The college has four PT clinics, including a neuro-clinic, where Mowder-Tinney’s focus is.

“I think one of my main interests, and what I’ve consistently been with (Gorbel) on, is that we have to challenge our clients more,” Mowder-Tinney said. “We’re not pushing them so that they can be more independent and be able to walk safely without falling.”

The harness helps push clients, as well as keeps both the client and therapist safe, she added.

Mowder-Tinney and her students tested the theory that clients would push themselves further if they were in the Gorbel harness because they did not fear falling. In the small, pilot study of two groups—one with the harness and one without—the study found that those using SafeGait with the harness were less fearful of falling.

“Fear of falling correlates directly to risk of falls,” Mowder-Tinney explained. “So that feeling of being in the harness and knowing they’re safe, they pushed themselves further than they would have if I was guarding them. With the harness it takes away that (fear) so they can push their system and push their brain.”

The SafeGait has a price tag of $185,000, Dolce said, but that is a small price to pay to keep a client or a therapist safe.

“Many facilities have said to us, all they have to do is prevent one patient injury or one worker injury and they’ve basically paid for the system,” she said.

Mowder-Tinney said she has been impressed with Gorbel and its medical division, particularly because they are keen to make the system better and it is obvious that they want to improve people’s lives.

“I really feel like it’s sincere,” she said. “Their dedication to the big picture and the vision is not about selling a piece of equipment; it’s such a bigger vision.”

And the company’s leaders trust their own products. When Reh’s 76-year-old father and founder of the company, Dave Reh, had major back surgery this past summer, he used the SafeGait system at Strong Memorial Hospital to recover.

“It improves lives and defies gravity,” Brian Reh said.

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