ToneUP - An Intelligent Bodysuit For Real-time Motion Capture And Assistance To Aid Prevention And Rehabilitation In Healthcare And Sporting Contexts

The Centre for Ageing Better and Public Health England recently brought together over 100 organisations to work together to make England the best country in the world to grow old, contributing to the UN's Decade of Healthy Ageing's vision for 2031\.

The mission of Tonus is aligned with their commitment, which is "putting prevention first and ensuring timely access to services and support when needed", which includes evidence-based interventions like strength and balance classes.

The application of wearable technologies has enabled sports scientists and clinicians to analyse and quantify workouts and predict the onset of injury. These applications are now ready to be transferred to larger user groups. In the field of healthy ageing in particular, these devices can encourage the assessment and monitoring of musculoskeletal ageing.

Tonus is developing a bodysuit with embedded sensors that tracks the movement of users' joints and assesses the quality of movement, encouraging people to improve their mobility through regular vigorous exercise routines.

Its innovative solution uses a combination of novel sensors that are distributed throughout the body and are not noticeable to the user, allowing completely unrestricted movements while exercising.

Users' activity can be monitored in real-time through the use of a wireless app that presents a 'digital twin' avatar of their movements, while intelligent machine learning models identify specific movement patterns and provide a 'score' of the quality of the movement, in terms of the range of motion, speed, smoothness and posture.

The collected data is fully anonymised to protect users' identity.

The long-term vision of Tonus Tech is to bridge the gap between wearable technologies and exosuits, combining multiple sensors, well-designed garments and soft robotics technologies into a product centered around ease of use, comfort and insightful feedback.

The future versions of the suit will not only sense, but also act on the sensed data, providing assistive nudges that will range from haptic 'prompts' that correct users' posture, to forces that can reduce the body's overall energy expenditure. Our long-term solution is an exosuit that gives people not only support but 'an extra push' while moving, just like an electric bike does.