Ephion Health was founded in Barcelona in 2021, originally as a spin-out from EURECAT and Hospital Sant Joan de Déu. They are a diverse team of data scientists, biomechanics engineers, app developers, experienced entrepreneurs, biomedical engineers and physiotherapists, and they are all united by a mission to develop digital tools that help clinicians and patients throughout the entire therapeutic journey.

We recently caught up with Mireia Claramunt, Co-Founder and CEO of Ephion Health, who told us more about their mission, vision, and how they came to be involved in PaLaDIn.

What led you to create Ephion Health, and what is your mission?

I have a background as a researcher, starting at a research centre in Catalonia, where we were mainly doing projects in biomechanics. But I always had the feeling that I wanted to do something more than research, or rather, to bring the research I was doing into the real world. This is, ultimately, why we built up Ephion – because our technology solves a real problem for patients, physicians, and the pharmaceutical industry.

Our mission is to provide digital tool that help patients, clinicians and the pharmaceutical industry during the entire therapeutic journey, from diagnosis through follow up and all the way to personalised treatment.

What is your role in PaLaDIn?

In PaLaDIn, we are mainly involved in the gait study, PaLaGAIT, as that’s basically what we do!

About PaLaGAIT: The study is a prospective (following patients forward in time), longitudinal (repeated over time), observational (observing without intervention) study designed to monitor gait in adult patients with selected neuromuscular diseases. The study will explore the use of wearable sensors in these patients to understand what data can be collect and used whilst they walk.
We are also going to test with new neuromuscular diseases, and see if there are any biomarkers- we can develop that are sensitive enough to measure changes in walking in these diseases that we will include in the PaLaDIn project – so that’s FSHD, LGMD, and other NMDs.

We also want to explore the link between our data and what can be shared with the platform that will ultimately become the Interactium®.

What is your impression of the PaLaDIn project so far?

I think it’s a great project, and I like that it is really focused on the patients, and having the patients be really actively involved in everything.

What difference do you hope to make through your involvement in PaLaDIn?
I’d like to be able to start standardising this type of gait test, and to have more objective gait tests, to make things easier for the patients who may currently be doing functional testing in hospital – with our technology, we can provide proof that they don’t need to do a six-minute walk test, for example, which can be difficult for many patients.

To find out more about Ephion Health, visit their website.