25 Nov AlgometRx and Key Tech to Develop Objective Pain Assessment Platform
AlgometRx has tapped Key Tech’s medical product development expertise to bring its Nociometer® pain assessment technology to market.
Washington, DC-based AlgometRx, Inc. and Baltimore’s Key Technologies, Inc. (Key Tech) will develop a pain identification and quantification platform to improve pain management. AlgometRx’s Nociometer® technology objectively measures patients’ pain levels, allowing physicians to choose the most appropriate medications and dosages.
Understanding the location and amount of pain children and nonverbal patients suffer is a constant challenge. Standard subjective techniques are imprecise and depend on the patient’s ability to communicate with physicians effectively. As a result, pain management requires an iterative process to identify the best analgesics and dosage levels.
“Even adults find communicating pain difficult with today’s smiling-to-frowning emoji scale,” explained AlgometRx Chief Operating Officer Kevin Jackson. “Children — especially those still developing their speaking skills — are often unable to express their pain. Doctors need objective methods to assess the source and extent of their patients’ pain.”
AlgometRx founder Dr. Julia Finkel, MD, is a pediatric anesthesiologist and the director of Pain Medicine Research & Development at the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation at Children’s National Hospital.
Dr Finkel’s research established an objective method to relate the stimulation response to the source and degree of pain. A proof-of-concept device has allowed AlgometRx to establish this relationship for different pain populations. AlgometRx is now ready to bring the Nociometer platform to market, with an initial focus on assessing pain in children with Lupus.
“We are excited to have Key Tech join us in this next phase of our development,” Jackson said. “The enthusiasm, professionalism, and experience Key Tech’s employee-owners bring to this relationship allows for true collaboration between our teams.
Key Tech’s multidisciplinary team specializes in developing complex yet intuitive medical devices that are functional, reliable, and user-friendly. Our in-house engineers and designers collaborate closely to evaluate needs, establish system requirements, and manage risk while ensuring the highest quality. We are dedicated to delivering innovative solutions for the most challenging healthcare applications.
“Everyone at Key Tech is thrilled to bring AlgometRx’s novel idea to life,” said Key Tech Senior Computer Engineer and Project Manager Anton Podkovorin. “Working with AlgometRx offers a real opportunity to combine all our disciplines to meet a huge clinical need.”
Go to www.algometrx.com to learn about AlgometRx and the Nociometer platform. Visit www.keytechinc.com for more information about Key Tech’s product design and development capabilities.
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About Key Tech: MedTech companies hire Key Tech to solve their toughest challenges through creative problem-solving, multidisciplinary expertise, and a user-focused approach. Through engagements ranging from rapid innovation cycles to deep technology assessments, Key Tech troubleshoots hard problems and defines optimal system architectures. From there, ISO-13485 compliant products are developed, evolving a series of prototypes until they are ready for manufacturing. Founded in 1998, Key Tech’s 75 design professionals include industrial designers and mechanical, electrical, and computer engineers led by experienced managers who tackle projects demanding a systems-level approach to problem-solving. Key Tech is 100% employee-owned and is based in Baltimore, MD.
About AlgometRx: AlgometRx, Inc. is a medical device startup spun out from Children’s National Hospital in 2015 by pediatric anesthesiologist Julia Finkel, MD. The Visual Analog Scale and other subjective methods for pain assessment are mechanism agnostic and fail to classify the pain’s etiology or help guide a specific intervention. The AlgometRx Nociometer® is a transformative platform technology that provides a more objective assessment and better monitoring of the impact of analgesics to enable a fundamental paradigm shift in pain assessment and analgesic prescribing.
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