Space for Kentucky - March 30 meeting
hello and welcome to the space for Kentucky meeting my name is Izzy house I am an author of some space marketing books and a podcast host and a Kentuckian space for Kentucky Roundtable is a place to bring together all of the space focused businesses and enthusiasts to learn discuss and share insights about the space industry it provides an opportunity for companies and individuals to come together and to grow our space industry in Kentucky and Beyond Kentucky we have a theme for each meeting and that way we can give have speakers give a sneak peek into the different Space Industries there's a list of Industries on space4kentucky.com plus the recordings from previous meetings I encourage you to sign up to receive information about upcoming meetings and notifications and when the recordings are posted the theme for tonight is NASA technology transfer program or spin-off Technologies the NASA technology transfer program ensures that innovations that are created up there and for the space industry are brought back down here for the availability to the public and maximizing the benefit to our nation our speakers tonight will discuss different aspects of the transfer Technology Program what the transfer technology program is how to use it and what are its benefits our speakers are lean a little from NASA Langley Research Center Kimberly hosback from the Space Foundation and there are two representatives of companies that have used space transfer technology and that would be Kevin hickley from activepure and Katie forth from zibrio so they're going to give us a sneak peek into what what that all is in in just a few minutes our first guest that is going to present is Lena little from the NASA Langley Research Center and she spoke last month at jobs in space when I started going out and you know asking about who could talk about this I I talked to some people that I knew and they sent me right back to Lena she is the wealth of knowledge for all of this stuff she is a regional partial partnership lead and a special events coordinator she is also a small business technology technical coordinator so welcome Lena and uh the stage is yours thank you thank you so much for having me so yes as Izzy said I am the regional Partnerships lead at Nasa Langley in Hampton Virginia but NASA um kind of gives us a territory for all the NASA centers and Kentucky is one of our territories we have a five-state region that we cover to work with small businesses industry and elected officials as well in that five-state region so I pay attention a lot to Kentucky related issues and I'm so happy that Izzy has asked me to come and talk again today about NASA technology transfer within our strategic Partnerships office that's where my job resides as well as technology transfer and in 1958 when NASA was established we were NACA before that we're actually this is our 106th anniversary at Nasa Langley but in 1958 NASA itself was created and in the founding legislation Congress had the forethought to ensure that Technologies created for space exploration and Aeronautics would benefit all of humanity by establishing the technology transfer program and as far as I know that's the first one in the entire United States of course many federal Labs now also have technology transfer programs and through that program NASA is able to bring together the most capable problem solvers in the world and match them with commercial and entrepreneurial leaders to develop technologies that can provide solutions to Everyday challenges in your normal life um those we call spin-offs and as we develop our mission work for the agency to solve tough challenges related to exploring space and advancing the understanding of our home planet and employ in improving air transportation for commercial flights often those inventions have some untapped applications it takes an entrepreneurial mind to understand the patent licensing process and take those Technologies and transform them into commercial products and solutions so there are a couple different licensing options that we offer our inventors go through a process to identify its commercial viability first of all so they would submit their invention or their IP their intellectual property through an internal process that we have that would determine whether or not that information is unique whether it has commercial viability and whether or not we're going to issue a patent for it and then all of that is posted on our website technology.nasa.gov you can go there and look at every single technology that we have patented not just in NASA Langley but across the agency we have 10 NASA centers across the country you can see what technologies might fit your needs you can search for specific topics when offshore wind energy batteries um bio bioengineering anything that may have been flagged for that technology to put in that bucket so you can see if it would help your business es or startups or even just students can license that technology and it comes that license comes in a couple different forms an exclusive license which means we don't do them very often but that would mean that a company would take that and ha and they would be the only other person only other entity in the world that would have access to that exclusive intellectual property then we have a non-exclusive license which means you borrow that intellectual property and see if you can commercialize it but it others may also do the same then we have what's called a startup license which is for a startup company and part of our uh part of our the point of the program is for economic growth and to help those small businesses and you may be aware that entrepreneurs and startups they first of all are green about how to start a business what they should do maybe they just have an idea but they don't know where to go and how to start and so the startup license gives them an opportunity to borrow the IP see if they want to commercialize it evaluate it and that last um that last licensing option is called an evaluation license they're able to see it for a limited period of time at no cost investigate its viability and then determine whether or not they want to change that to an actual licensing agreement some examples of spin-offs you can go to spinoff.nasa.gov that website does not
profile every single spin-off that has ever been created but there's about 2 000 of them there telling really great stories you're able to actually drill down by state and so I pulled a few Kentucky ones that I thought were really interesting and they really just run the gamut of its applications some of them are very scientific for example satellite data to inform forecasts for crop growth we actually did a project in Virginia um with the viticulture industry taking the satellite data and seeing where the best places were to grow grapes because we in Virginia have over 150 Vineyards so that's an interesting way to apply satellite data another one that I saw here in Kentucky was for bowling ball spotting and so there apparently was a company that used uh NASA technology and physics discoveries to figure out the best way to weight the bowling ball so that it has the proper physics to roll down the bowling alley um another one here was earthquake Information Systems evaluating earthquakes getting that information out in real time to people to keep them more safe and then there's some information about zero G Manufacturing so that's manufacturing and space with no gravity and Manufacturing Systems and there was one about turf grass conditioning so when they are they took some kind of bioengineering and applied it to golf courses to keep the grass growing at extreme temperatures I I just think this is amazing that um the person who's sitting at Nasa the engineer they're solving a problem that is for NASA it's very specifically for the work that we are doing but then there's a whole array of other applications that will benefit from that mission work so I get the question a lot why are we so much spending so much money to go to space when we have so much need here on Earth and the answer really is that it it's we received that benefit a hundred times over by the research that we do along the way so you can go to technology.nasa.gov learn about the licensing process and what technologies we have available for patenting I'm sorry for what patent Technologies we have available for licensing and you can go to spinoff.nasa.gov to learn about all of the wonderful success stories and I know that you'll hear about that some of them today as well thank you thank you thank you Lena are there any uh quick questions real quick before we go on to the next speaker and we'll have a q a at the end as well and all right so we're going to um start the next one let me uh go ahead and change the view to Gallery again and Space Foundation is a entity that certifies that the technology that a company is using came from space back last summer I had the opportunity to go to the ISS r d conference in in DC and I met Kim there and we we literally had a blast pun intended we did so Space Foundation is actually the company that is also doing the space Symposium April 17th through 20th which is one of the the bigger biggest shows for space so they're they're a little busy and and Frank had to got tore away for that so Kimberly hospack uh welcome to the meeting and we look forward to hearing all about Space Foundation thank you Izzy um hi peeps I'm Kimberly hosbeck and I manage the certified space technology program at Space Foundation and just in case some of you don't aren't familiar with Space Foundation it is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1983 by several retired Air Force personnel who had a love for space and it's based in Colorado Springs Colorado uh the mission of the Space Foundation is advocating for innovation bettering life on Earth and the the organization is divided into three we call them pillars essentially stands for divisions we have our Center of innovation and education so that's a a program that works with K through 12 programs stem programs and helps with space education and also works with universities with space education then we have our Global Alliance which partners with International organizations all over the world including pretty much every continent except for and our Antarctica and then we have what's called Symposium 365. and that is um the uh Izzy mentioned space Symposium is happening next month that's the division that puts on what is our Flagship event it's an annual event that attracts approximately 15 000 people each year to Colorado Springs and that's what we are preparing for we only have a couple weeks left uh and in that same division Symposium 365 is where my program is certified space technology uh program and that program was created in 1995. and it was created in cooperation with NASA specifically the program was created to help support entrepreneurs and businesses who have licensed that NASA patented technology originally developed for use in space exploration but now are using that Tech in everyday products and one of the ways that my program helps to support entrepreneurs is with their marketing efforts specifically because NASA cannot permit the people who license the patented technology those entrepreneurs cannot use the NASA meatball logo to Market so entrepreneurs who really want to capture and ex and show the market that they have a connection to like the passion of space the adventure of space The Cutting Edge technology of space they need another way to do that and that's where the Space Foundation stepped in and created What's called the certified space technology seal and it's a process we have at Space Foundation to verify that a product genuinely and authentically is connected to space exploration and space technology and once that process is successfully completed then we call them Partners certified Partners can use our seal in their marketing efforts to Showcase their connection to space and showcase the technology that is you know unique and special and exciting so the uh just one moment uh that the seal uh is used currently by two of our certified Partners who are here today uh and I don't want to take up too much time because I I do know their products and both of their products are incredibly relevant and Incredibly pertinent to what's going on today I know that Lena had talked about some examples of different types of spin-off Tech and the the range of spin-off technology is pretty broad you'll find it in healthcare and you'll find it in agriculture in Environmental Conservation in public safety uh in transportation so the range of fields that spin-off technology touches is fairly Broad and like Lena I also looked at some Kentucky stats for space for Kentucky and there is a report NASA published last year in October 2022 called the economic impact report and so for Kentucky specifically the direct impact a positive impact of NASA activities benefited the state to the tune of over 33 million dollars in 2021 and that same report shows that the direct impact of NASA activities for the whole nation is over 71 billion dollars billion with a B in 2021 so spin-off is not a small thing it's a big thing and I think when you hear the stories of the two certified Partners here today active pier and zibrio you'll really see how space technology does make a positive and significant difference in literally our everyday lives so I'll end it there because I do want to get to the stories of both active peer and zibrio I forgot to do Zoom or forgot to do mute all right well thank you Kim and is there any specific questions before we move on to the stories um Izzy I had one more go back because it's my favorite spin-off but um I forgot to mention this there is a NASA inventor who created a sensor That Was Then licensed for medical use in pacemakers and my mom has that pacemaker so I like to say that NASA saved my mom's life and so that's my favorite spin-off that's it awesome awesome that's a good one and that's a good reason so uh the the next is we're going to get into the stories and the first one is activepure which uses some technology to provide cleaner air and they were they used Tech to fight them pandemic and I'm very curious as to to that story activepure is one of only 75 technologies that have been introduced into the space Technology Hall of Fame in the past 30 years so um Kevin hickey from activepure the president of activepure is going to tell us all about what that means great well thanks for having me welcome we appreciate the invite love to uh do things to support the Space Foundation as well as the Space Program all together they've been very good to us and we certainly like to return the favor whenever we get the opportunity so thank you for the invitation for today so yeah it's a great segue from what you've heard already from Lena and from Kimberly so um we we've been around for almost 100 years as a business um we started in 1924 here in the United States and some of you may remember the name some of you may not but your parents certainly would as we were the original Electrolux vacuum cleaner company initially okay so that's where our Roots were so we were always in trying to take care of people's homes to keep the uh the homes clean and the air cleaning homes believe it or not that was a predecessor to air purifiers and that was making sure you had a good vacuum cleaner taking care of the home so but over the years businesses evolved and certainly ours has evolved over the Hundred Years um and one of the things we started moving into more was um Healthy Home Products and and trying to make sure that we were doing things to advance just past a flow care so air purification air filtration became certainly one of the areas that we've moved into uh you know back years ago and at the same time probably in the 90s the NASA and had a partnership with the University of Wisconsin where they were looking to solve a problem where I think a lot of you know this but in in a lot of the space exploration whether it's space station space shuttle they were always doing experiments at some of those experiments usually involve growing plants in space so one of the challenges that they were trying to solve for when growing plants in space is you're producing ethylene gases but the outgassing off of the of the plants and you can't just open a window in the space shuttle or in the in the space station to to get rid of those ethylene gases so they needed to come up with a way to deal with that and that was the research they worked on together with the University of Wisconsin that believes in Madison Dr Mark Anderson and they came up with what they call an ethylene scrubber to take care of that problem um and it was first used I think in the space program in the uh 1995 and I believe it was Columbia space shuttle program uh that was first chance they had to use it so and I'll tell you an interesting story about that here in a minute but so that was the connection to the space program was the ethylene scrubber was basically based on what they call a a process called PCO or photocatalytic oxidation so it's basically shining a uh an ultraviolet light of a certain wavelength on a Target material that's treated with titanium dioxide and that would create these methylene scrubbers a lack of a better term out of the the um the moisture in the air the humidity in the air as well as the air going through this catalytic process would create these scrubbers that would would disperse the ethylene gases okay so that was the basis of the Technologies PCO and it's used in a lot of applications all over the world uh it has been for years and years and years but for us uh it came into our purview I guess in the uh in around 2009 when we we were acquiring a business that had a technology that was based off a PCO um technology is its platform and we've taken it since then and been able to develop it and through our engineering staff and and take it and turn it into what has become a very powerful air and surface purification technology so but we love the connection to the Space Program so we were always curious about how we could tie into that a little more deeply and of course uh be introduced to the Space Foundation through the through the company we were acquiring they had already started to to have a relationship there so I made it my personal mission to work very closely with the Space Foundation from about 2009 on because I just saw that as a great opportunity for both them and for us to be able to promote exactly what they were looking to promote right which is how do we take technologies that have been developed for the space program but bring them back to Earth and commercialize them and be able to use them to help everyone here on Earth and we thought this was a great story so we've been very uh cognizant about trying to make sure not just a story but something that is people can can really believe in and a technology to back up that the products are going to do what they say they're going to do so we've done a tremendous amount of testing and and validation and continue to do so uh to show the world that this technology is exactly what we say it is and it's very very powerful and and it's the same process that I explained earlier it's a catalytic process but our our formula is what makes this this our active pure formula which makes this very special and it creates these these now what we would call uh denied ethylene scrubbers anymore but these are really just powerful scrubbers that go out into the environment and clean the air in real time in a room as well as they'll then land on surfaces and tabletops door knobs light switches everything in the in the space and basically purify them as well so and all this can be done with people in the environment no one has to leave the space it's all very natural it really is recreating the processes that happen in nature every day between you know the oxidation process that happens naturally in the environment outside so us getting tied in with the Space Foundation was really important because they certainly promote this and they and they they were then kind enough to introduce us to the people over at Nasa and we started dealing with like Terry Taylor who Lena assuming you know probably from the technology transfer program down here at the Marshall space flight center he was part of the induction into the Hall of Fame with us as well back in uh in 2017 so it's just been a great relationship for us um I can't say enough about it if you don't know much about the the Space Foundation and you're tied into the technology or you have an opportunity to work with them I highly encourage you to do that because they're really good at what they do the folks over there and we try to make sure that we're out there every year to support them at the space Symposium and do the things that we can do to return the favor so um come back to us so we then in our relationship with space validation we're fortunate enough to get nominated for the Hall of Fame as you mentioned earlier so back in 2017 we had the the honor of being inducted into the Space Foundation Hall of Fame along with Dr Anderson from the University of Wisconsin as well as the Marshall space flight center and the technology transfer program and that's certainly been something that we're very proud of and as you mentioned at that time there was only maybe 75 other Technologies in the world with that recognition things that most people would recognize uh Tempur-Pedic beds uh the Tempur-Pedic mattresses the GPS systems that everybody now has on their phones and in their cars and just about everywhere in everyday life these days um satellite radio I'm trying to think of some of the ones that are just pretty obvious that people would recognize but there's a whole host of of these technologies that uh again started out as as Lena mentioned things that were created for the space program and are now giving back a hundred fold and probably a thousand fold back to the world because they've been now able to take them and commercialize these and bring them to the world so so we're very happy to be a part of that program so and we just think it's a it's a really really strong connection it is here domestically but even more so internationally because people worldwide are still very very enamorative NASA and the space program they just are it just it's just it's a different connection with people when you start talking about that so they just they really connect to that very heavily and they really just are are proud to be associated with a product that has roots that come from there so I guess the best way I can explain it so um so that's our story again we're coming up on about 100 years here and as I said companies have to keep innovating and changing to stick around that length of time and we certainly feel like we've made a great jump in in technology and Innovation with our active gear technology and and we're just proud to be associated with both the space program and NASA and the Space Foundation so Izzy thank you again for inviting us here today to be part of you well I've got a quick question absolutely tell us about your your part in dealing with the pandemic you know using your your technology in the pandemic yeah so as as we went through um we knew this technology was very powerful but as we started doing testing and trying to show people okay exactly what can we do and how fast can we do it we were able to go and start doing as the pandemic set in in uh a couple years back now we knew that there was going to be a challenge right away we started I guess it got recognized really heavily starting in March of that year 2020 but in January we started hearing Rumblings about this situation in China and potentially having something that is you know was was was going to create an issue worldwide so my partner Joe Ursa who was couldn't join us here today our CEO and myself spent a lot of time sitting down and looking at and saying okay we've really got to ramp up our supply chain and really get ourselves ready for being able to help people because we know we have a solution that's going to help people here okay and we have to make sure we have enough of it to be able to do that a lot of companies got caught short people that were out there with any other type of purification or filtration products HEPA filters and things like that everybody was very much uh limited by the amount of inventory they had currently right because a lot of these companies get their products from overseas a lot of them out of China and there's a long lead time when you're trying to get to that type of product so they didn't they weren't able to respond very quickly and be able to ramp up their production to be able to meet the demand that was coming and the demand was unbelievable that came once the pandemic started we fortunately manufacture most of our products in our facility in Bristol Virginia and so our key was just ramping up on the raw materials and making sure we could get as much in here as we could and we picked some very long bets because we just knew it was the right thing to do and we had to do this to to because we could be saving lives whether we knew it or not that was that was the potential Pitfall of not doing this so we did and we ramped up and and we said well you know what we're going to build ourselves we'll do six months of finished goods inventory and another six months of raw materials and that should keep us well ahead of the curve right and in the first month the pandemic really ramped up in in March we sold through all of that inventory and all the raw materials needed to build the additional inventory so that whole Year's worth of stock that we built up was gone in 30 days because people couldn't get anywhere else they were running out of everything so thankfully we had stayed ahead of that and we kept pushing it pushing we didn't just say hey we're going to get six months to stop there we were we were working to keep that running so we had plenty in the pipeline and kept coming to us and so we were able to use our technology to help a lot of people the part that I didn't mention here is we were doing testing and of course once we knew what we were dealing with this this covid-19 situation we went said okay who could test for this right because it's like when Anthrax or anything come out it's a very limited number of places that can be tested right you have to get a uh BSL for lab usually military controls those so we were able to work through some contacts here locally in Texas and through the government and we got hooked up with a with a bsl4 lab here military lab in Texas and we were able to get the testing done and we were able to show that with activepure we were able to eliminate the SARS CO2 virus that came from the covid-19 in less than at the first testing we did it was in in uh I think it was less than two minutes uh but we they came back and told us afterwards they said you know it only shows less than two minutes because we were unable to measure down as low as we needed to because we think this is doing it even faster than that we said well how can we find that out and they said well we'll have to do build another test chamber and get the equipment that'll let us measure even lower to do that we said okay well let's do that it's important for us to know this and they sure enough they went back and did it and came back and said well we were right it actually in under a minute we were able to eliminate the Cyrus Cove 2 virus in the environment so from the ambient air and from the surfaces takes a little bit longer but in the ambient air it's it's readily just running into it you know as the molecules are floating around in there so are the active pure molecules and as they run into them they're basically denaturing really anything that's a virus bacteria fungus all of those things we've tested against every one of those things and they all have the same kind of results very quick very effective it's just it's an amazing technology now prior to the pandemic not a lot of people cared about that they cared about maybe our allergies or have asthma and I want to have be able to breathe better so that was how they looked at air purification or air filtration once the pandemic hit and they realized this was a lot more dangerous it was about a lot more than just allergies and Asthma now suddenly the world takes a whole different outlook on it so that whole industry has changed pretty dramatically in the last couple of years and so as you can imagine it's been quite a wild ride for us but you know we're loving it and we're just so proud and happy again of all these associations with you guys but also to be able to get out and and help the world so and we're not just doing it here in the states we do it worldwide so it's been a been a pretty uh pretty uh amazing run here in the last couple of years so I don't know if that answers your question is he but it does it does so you basically clean the air and now does your technology have anything to do with what they treat at the grocery stores before they take that particular they make vegetables grow or stay fresher longer because they will I mean it's so we've yeah we've got products we've got over 100 products that have active pure technology in them everything from just small portable products you would use in your household to commercial type products that would be used in it could be used in air conditioning systems they can be used in in restaurants and and we have uh walk-in coolers walk-in freezers and things of that nature so yes we have we could help people in those types of scenarios absolutely so and and the beauty of it is we have 100 or so products but we could we could design products for any scenario from this big to you know industrial size so it's uh we're not limited by what we can really do with the technology awesome awesome well I I do appreciate and any immediate questions anybody else has before we move on to the next guest like I said we'll have q a at the end as well so thank you Kevin I do very much appreciate you coming tonight and I know it was short notice so glad to have you here well thank you our next speaker is a person that has uh it's uh Katie forth and she is CEO and co-founder of zibrio which has been nominated for NASA's invention of the year for its fall prevention Innovation where astronauts come back and they have balance issues well you know so do a lot of older people so this is a new technology that they've taken from space to help people from falling down so Katie welcome thank you for being here thank you so much thank you and uh yeah so as you could say this is now time for something completely different so we're going from Air to people um is it possible to share a slide got pictures if you want to see some pictures that always makes it more fun doesn't it yes you should be able to all right well so yes astronauts when they return back down to earth it's a problem but uh also those astronauts on the moon they also fell down so this is uh some screenshots from some of those videos mildly amusing so we've you know America's uh funny videos kind of variety of things but if that astronaut actually fell on a rock and split their suit that would be catastrophic so um preventing falls on the moon on Mars um also down here on Earth once the astronauts return has been a strong Focus for decades um I was a scientist in the Neuroscience laboratory uh to Johnson's Space Center so I'm based in Houston and uh just like the accent and uh you know we've been looking at these data for decades of data just to try and understand well what's going on what's Happening to astronauts and uh you know falling down it's a gravity problem so if you want to think about here on Earth um you've got many people who fall down um yes older adults but it's actually falling down is the number one reason for trauma deaths and Trauma injury for any age just let that one sink in for a little bit for any age so it's um you know how well do we handle gravity if you've got um if you're in a health system they'll usually come up with different risk factors for falling usually they'll start with age although that's not really the ageist honestly um but let's uh let's now think of it differently so if you can understand how well the body's controlling itself relative to gravity you can now start to get to a point where you can identify who is struggling to handle gravity so when we're looking at astronauts on the moon so it's an altered gravity environment we were designing this invention for Martian Expeditions and maybe they stop off at the Moon on their way back down going to Earth and we want to check their health before they go um and then also the switching between gravity environments is very disturbing for your neuromuscular system and so given all of that we want to understand how well the body handles gravity how well can it control itself so the original invention was to go inside the moon boot the Martian boot um we took a big piece of equipment it was about the size of a uh a phone booth and uh we got it into the booth so into like an insole and we did that by coming up with a very strong algorithm it uh it is AI so we have people now who stand on a scale that's where we put the uh the algorithm now so you stand on the scale it's measuring the force under your feet and as you're standing there of course your body is going to be making tiny tiny little movements we're measuring that across 60 seconds we use that AI to understand when is the body in control what is it in equilibrium and when is it having moments of micro failure of control so that's what we're doing but we put it into a very easy to understand score of one to ten so if um if you are scoring a one two and three that's very high risk for falling and if you're in the green you're doing fine that's low risk for falling and what this graph here is showing you is that 78 of people who will fall down in the next 12 months are scoring in the range of one two three and four so this is a predictor this predicts if someone is going to fall down in the next 12 months and you do it in 60 seconds just from standing with your eyes open now if you can predict who's going to fall you can then start to take action to prevent all of that and um and just before I talk about the intervention the school in and itself I mean it's fascinating you can learn so much just with a single test but also as you track yourself um this is a normative graph so this is from published data and medical journals um you've got your score from the left one to ten you've got your risk categories that have nothing to do with age um yellow green and red and this is a normative chart so this is very similar to the height and weights chart that you'll see with children in the pediatricians so 50th percentile that's average for the age and you'll see that after about 55 years it's nose diving so there's a drop ten percent per decade so very often people are thinking about oh if you're over 80 then it's a problem it's like well yes it is a problem more than half the population is at risk so we do need to make sure we look after those eight-year-olds and above but so look at the top for the 90th decade decade that's absolutely crushing it and saying here's here's some non-slip mats to put in your bath to watch out for you know it's just it's not um the things that we want to provide for care need to match up in the ability of that individual and you can also see here at the say if you pick a 65 year old and let's say they score a five um their average they're doing fine um a doctor might communicate that and say all right Mr Jones you scored a five you're doing fine uh you are average and Mr Jones might say well I've been average all my life and the doctor might say yes but here's where it's going how about we do something now to try and Elevate you so you have a different trajectory so not only can we predict 12 months in advance not only can we provide the context of that score to motivate but you can now see trajectories 20s 30 40 years in advance to really start to take action and and prevent Falls for yourself but also for a population when we left this technology in a senior living facility there was Independence in living in Houston we just left it there for people to use there was a 74 reduction in Falls with no intervention given yeah it's not a magic scale but what we do these are published data as well um we attribute this effect to enhance self-regulation and self-efficacy so people started to own their health Journey they saw their score and they thought yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna do something about that um everything became urgent and uh and something that needed to be done now rather than I'll leave it it's just like our exercise isn't it it's like yeah I'll do do that next week or if somebody said to you how much exercise do you do you'll tell them what you think you do and then you might think well what did I actually do yesterday or the day before is it the same and so that's very much what happened here somebody will stand on the scale they get a score it's very very sensitive piece of equipment um if you have one bad night's sleep your balance can drop up to 40 percent so changes in medications uh sleep patterns mood um diet obviously exercise patterns so many things can affect your balance and until you measure it you have no idea where you are on any given day and what affects you most so these particular people they had a chance to see and they acted on it some talked to their doctors about their medications some said I knew I knew that medication was doing something funny to me I'm going to talk to my doctor or another one who uh unexpectedly scored lower um had a trend that was doing just fine and had a an unusual score um I went every Friday and listened that's what I did for two years um and this particular woman she um she had a a friend who had died that week and she was feeling pretty down about it but nothing had changed in in her other behaviors so you know there's an acute depression in that or mood change that that affected her balance there's also other things like somebody came in with a walker they came in they stepped on the scale they got a seven out of ten they scored amazingly and so you know you ask so who prescribed you the Walker oh it was my late husband's I took it when he died you may like to speak to your doctor about whether you need it so you know it's just it's these very uh personable things that come out of uh the the measurements that we have here and at this point we've um we've provided access to over 20 000 people um and that's only just getting the scales onto the market last year thank you pandemic for all those delays um finally got there we are in a number of different places um but you can see here that uh the head of the national osteoporosis Foundation this is an absolute Game Changer it absolutely is um you've got a primary care physician who is they're being surprised by the people that are being identified as being at risk and um and so this is giving the opportunity to reach patients that wouldn't have been reached otherwise and there's one stat that really captures that which is that um current clinical tools before us were missing 69 to 85 of at-risk individuals so right off the bat whatever they were doing which was usually asking if someone had fallen in the last year whatever they were doing wasn't identifying the right people so um it's it's been very challenging um to then have any kind of full prevention and thoughts have been increasing year after year at 1.4 so
whatever has been done isn't working so we are in primary care we're in hospitals clinics pharmacies PT um Sports Fitness in people's homes anywhere that somebody needs to measure themselves or their patients we want to make sure that this technology isn't just kept for a few astronauts but is actually here to help people on Earth and so that was our mission when we were sitting at lunch at Nasa after we'd invented it realized how powerful it was and I mean we literally were talking about our experiences I had a grandmother who had fallen when she was around 86 or so had broken her hip and her wrist and it had ultimately led to her demise and she was a very athletic lady um my co-founder had a Sim experience with his grandmother and it's preventable and so when you've invented something and you know how powerful it is you can't just sit on it and so we said we should do something about it yes we should and we stood up and that was it we were off so it's amazing how how important those moments are um I'll just give you one other quick picture which is this is one of our versions as well we have a variety of different versions of packages and this is a self-testing bundle I show you this one because this is in Louisville Kentucky so it's in the Thrive Center and that's a an innovation Center for age Tech so if anybody wants to go and visit it's a very cool space it's called the Thrive Center and they have lots of different technologies that people can come and look at they have different mock-ups of rooms of different homes so we have a couple of different implementations there so um yeah definitely sending our love over to our kentuckians so is that the is are is that the last slide it can be I always have more slides than I need okay guys are always good I guess you can always uh end on this one which is we're on a mission to save the world from falling down wow I have to say I I never thought of falling like that before and didn't realize that it was so interesting and preventable yeah and preventable that's the thing preventable it's the fifth um highest most expensive health condition for healthcare spending in the country shift wow wow that's that's awareness is is half the battle right there it is and very often people have denial we all have denial about all sorts of Health situations and it's only when you get that cold hard number that you're like okay all right this is important now but if it seems if it comes across someone's opinion if it's subjective you just you don't cut through that denial and and so this is where you can get the 74 reduction because a lot of it is actually lifestyle related people do know generally what to do for their health but until you feel the impetus and that urgency it's good for another day but um but yeah you can really start to uh tap into the psyche of people just by this this measurement and we were a sponsor of the national Senior Games in 2019 and and then again in 2022 and don't you know we had more than 20 people come to us in 2022 they remembered their score and they wanted to see where they were that year something it's something that we can we have any control over it's just oh that's just a part of life you fall down you when you're little and you hurt you scrape your knee and when you get older that um you don't bounce as you get older you you kind of just shatter so and I'm thinking of a high profile fall in Kentucky well with the senator from Kentucky who the injuries were enough concussion plus he was in the hospital I can't remember how many days four or five and then he was in a inpatient uh rehab for a couple weeks right I don't I I did not know that Senator McConnell okay no he fell just just in February and at a hotel in DC and it was a a serious fall in the hospital for several days concussion and then significant amount of time to rehab so yeah I mean this is the thing is that you don't people don't necessarily assume although I believe he had Polio when he was younger and so obviously some gates and control issues but you can always maximize yourself wherever you are whatever state you're in you can always enhance things I mean it is a question of did he sleep badly that night before so whatever state he was in and then you had a bad night's sleep might have dropped him down even lower um and so yeah I mean it's it's something that when we hear about it and when anybody's trips what what's the first thing they do they look behind them don't they like oh who did that to me not me it's something back there it's got me and so while it's an accident it's no accident that it happens so there's there is a bit of Education that's required here is that you can predict these things now there is one exception and that is the high velocity Falls slips and tricks other types that have these high velocities um so if you are low low risk on our scale that doesn't mean you won't fall it means low probability of falling but people in that category if they fell 72 percent of the time it's because of a slip or a trip so if you're trying to then communicate to a patient to a loved one or anyone about how to prevent a fall let's say you're osteoporotic and you're scoring eight out of ten so your balance is great but the consequence of Falling Down is so high you really want to be careful so then it's like the communication there is you're doing great you know you're balancing well so feel good about that but just know people like you if you were to fall it's 72 percent of the time it's because of a slipper trip here are some some things to help avoid slips and trips now you're really speaking the language of that person and it really resonates with them so that they'll want to act on that information whereas before like I said if you just give a generalized solution you're not you're missing the chance to uh to actually reach them properly wow well that's that's extremely interesting um thank you so much and and do we have any questions let's open it up to everyone and and let's let's have some question time and you are all on mute so I'm gonna unmute well I can't unmute you I can only ask you to unmute so Now's the Time to ask all of our guests some questions well go back to the um what did you end up doing for the astronauts in in their boot well so I mean we ended up not getting into the boot in the end um we uh but we did use our data to then um Identify some of the different adaptations that happen when they return um but we're actually being used in a vomit comment study um in June so that's exciting so we've got some of the those scales are going to start flying around as well um it's a very quick assessment and and one of the things I mean it's a little hard when NASA's invested a hundred thousand dollars into a piece of equipment to say oh we've got this one for a lot cheaper that's even better so um yeah we want to know that because we're then going to buy the cheaper one that's okay yeah the difference in price that we charge 190 dollars per month so a bit of a magnitude difference there but um but yeah so I mean it's there in terms of trying to help identify that particular piece of it um for astronauts they do have a lot of vestibular adaptations um we're not especially paying attention to that so the machine they have does more than just measure balance can't predict Falls but it can try and help to separate how well they're re-adacting with their vestibular system so so they're still still has value awesome awesome so are there any other questions for anybody all right well I with all my heart I appreciate you you presenting tonight and and adding to the our information because I think that people don't realize just how much space impacts their daily life and this is a part of getting that awareness out is that it is in every aspect of your life even places you don't even think so with that I'm going to call the meeting and uh if you want to see the recording it's at a space4kentucky.com and we'll have that this weekend thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you bye bye bye
2023-04-08 19:22
