Ralph Steidl is the CEO of Portabiles Healthcare Technologies, a German startup developing high-precision solutions for medical gait analysis. During the first edition of SMP, Portabiles Healthcare Technologies was selected for Ferrer’s challenge on Parkinson’s disease and freezing episodes. 

• As a brief introduction to Portabiles Healthcare Technologies, can you tell us how your product is improving the patient experience? 

Our gait analysis system, Mobile GaitLab supports individual therapy decisions for Parkinson’s patients based on data from their everyday life. Parkinson’s patients fall twice as often as other seniors at the same age which leads to fractures, hospitalisation, loss of quality of life and a high cost burden. With AI-based algorithms, Mobile GaitLab supports treating doctors to improve the condition of their patients by precisely knowing about the timing and intensity of the symptom patterns.

• Your product was a perfect match for Ferrer’s challenge on Parkinson’s disease. What was the motivation for applying to the program?

We learned about the SMP while applying for another EIT Health Program. Matteo informed us and we were excited by the chance to get access to EIT Health’s network as well as mentoring and coaching – and additionally get in touch with Pharma companies, which are one of our target customers.

• We are interested in your perspective on SMP. Can you share your experience with us?

The onsite program in Heidelberg gave us great insights into design thinking, how to prepare and present our pitch, delivering a clear business proposal and understand how investors think. The meeting with the pharma companies at their premises was a great experience and we are still in touch with some of the contacts.

• The idea behind SMP is to provide startups with access to key players, top-notch mentoring and the possibility to expand the network. What were the major takeaways for Portabiles from Startups meets Pharma?

We greatly benefitted from the grant for mentoring and coaching – how to transfer our message through a short pitch. We also received valuable feedback from Investors from the EIT Health network on how to “sharpen” our message. The greatest benefit is, that we are now part of the EIT Health “Family” – we are regularly invited to EIT Health events and we receive a lot of support from the CLC and the overall EIT Health organisation.

• One year later, what is the Portabiles team focused on these days?

Raising our seed investment round to have our medical device CE-Label in July this year.