The KineMo sport, health and fitness platform started life as a research project in Trinity College Dublin in the early 2020s when its injury biometrics team was approached by Leinster Rugby to investigate the use of video in head injury assessments.
As the research progressed, the team began delving into the use of single-camera video to provide an objective assessment of movement quality in athletic development and rehabilitation.
Most movement assessments are subjective as they are generally observation-based. Sophisticated labs that can analyse movement in minute detail exist, but access to these facilities is limited, expensive and simply not feasible where large numbers of people - such as entire teams - need to be assessed.
The KineMo solution benchmarks itself against lab-based gold-standard marker systems. It bridges the gap between the accuracy and detail of a motion-capture lab and human assessments by eye, providing physios, coaches, sports scientists and clinicians with objective and standardised assessments of movement competency.
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KineMo’s AI-powered system will work with any smartphone camera to quantify kinematics (movement competency) in 3D across several core exercises, such as sprinting and gait. The system can be used in person or remotely, and it works equally well for an individual or for thousands of athletes.
“How we move in athletic development, health and rehabilitation is critical, yet even the most experienced practitioners can miss a significant share of movement issues by eye, and expert practitioners regularly disagree on what they have observed,” explains KineMo chief executive and co-founder, Leo Peyton.
“If we can measure movement accurately, then we have a duty of care to do so to make sure we are not exposing individuals, particularly young developing athletes, to avoidable risk.
“Billions of movement assessments are made every year worldwide, across sport, health, fitness and the workplace,” Peyton adds. “The vast majority are done by eye with no consistent way to track, quantify or score them. High-end traditional motion capture labs are used in some environments, but they do not provide the ease of use and scalability needed.
“KineMo changes this by giving practitioners the tool and, more importantly, the actionable outputs they need to objectively measure movement. It provides professionals with key information to inform training, rehab, health, research and fitness programmes from elite athletes down to local level. The system, which has been internationally peer-reviewed since the get-go, is democratising lab-grade movement analysis, making it easily accessible to all.”
Before KineMo’s direction was set, Peyton spoke to more than 50 sporting and other organisations, including the police and the military, to get a fix on exactly what they needed when analysing movement.
“They wanted a level of detail and accuracy in the metrics that would be comparable to sending somebody to a motion capture lab,” he says. “That set a high bar for us. In addition, it had to be a system that could cope with volume, as a club could have maybe 50 or more athletes running around the place during a session, so there isn’t time to place body markers on individuals or set up multiple cameras. Standard video provides 30 frames per second. We can provide 60 frames, and the information we gather is in detailed three dimensions.”
KineMo spun out from Trinity College in April 2024 and now employs six people.
About €1 million has been invested in the platform to date between commercialisation and pre-seed startup funding from Enterprise Ireland, private investment and early commercial revenue. KineMo has had paying customers for the last 18 months.
The company is launching a funding round to raise €1.5 million, which will be used to grow the team and continue product development. The company’s revenue model is subscription-based. It is charged per practitioner and based on the number of annual assessments. KineMo is based in Dublin with a presence in the UK and has clients across Ireland, the UK, continental Europe and the Middle East.
“There are many challenges in starting any new business, and they change at every stage of the journey.”
The company’s initial focus is on the elite and developmental sport market and specifically on those working in athletic development and rehabilitation.
“KineMo’s customers are the practitioners and the organisations that employ them,” Peyton says. “In sport that means national governing bodies, professional clubs, academies and high-performance centres. In health, where our platform is also applicable, it means physiotherapy clinics, longevity and rehabilitation centres and increasingly, insurance-funded clinical networks.
“We already have strong traction in professional cricket, rugby, the Premier League and across other sports and from there our roadmap moves into broader physiotherapy and clinical rehabilitation, research and wellness,” says Peyton, who adds that the Institute for Healthier Living in Abu Dhabi is a client.
“Our system will also have applications in occupational health and high-performance environments outside sport such as defence and emergency services. We are an active member of the ESA (European Space Agency) business incubation centre in Ireland, which is operated locally by Tyndall National Institute in Cork, and this has opened doors to the agency itself, where our technology is being evaluated for use in astronaut training and rehabilitation.”
KineMo has four cofounders. Chief executive Leo Peyton comes from a finance and commerce background and has worked in sports technology for over 15 years. The chief scientific officer, Prof Ciaran Simms, leads the TCD Injury Biomechanics research group while technical lead, Clara Mercadal Baudart, is a biomechanical engineer with experience of translating research into commercial settings. Prof Aljosa Smolic, a former Trinity College academic now at Lucerne University, is a specialist in immersive realities research.
“There are many challenges in starting any new business, and they change at every stage of the journey,” Peyton says. There are technical challenges in developing the underlying engine and platform, resource challenges, market challenges, challenges with the speed of development in AI and challenges in moving organisations away from manual processes. Raising capital is always difficult for any start-up.
“That said, Enterprise Ireland has been an enormous support to us, not just with funding, but with mentoring, market validation, international trade missions and advisory access. The pre-seed start fund is a very welcome initiative in the Irish start-up ecosystem and has materially helped us bridge the gap from research bench to commercial company,” adds Peyton, who has been down the startup road before.
“The mistakes you make and the scars you have from previous start-ups are valuable, but starting a new business is still a massive learning curve, and there are always lots and lots of things that you could do better,” he says.
