Tanya Colonna, Med-Tech World’s first pitch winner muscles in on the preventative care space

What if we could see what muscles are doing when they’re performing natural dynamic human movement? CEO of Oro Muscles, Tanya Colonna, speaks to Med-Tech News

In this exclusive interview, Maria Debrincat spoke to Tanya Colonna, CEO of Oro Muscles and this year’s Pitch winner, as she opens up about her product and its benefits saying that it improves training and rehabilitation and pushes the healthcare industry towards preventative care and telemedicine.

From this interview, we could easily note that Tanya is passionate, authentic, and believes in what she works towards. Oro Muscles is a software analytics company at heart, which utilizes reinforced machine learning to combine expert coaching knowledge with the analytical power of AI. This combination takes away the problematic “black box” of typical AI solutions to give practical, transparent, actionable metrics for optimizing personalised training.
Oro Muscles has developed the Oro System, which allows trainers and clinicians to see inside the muscles of their clients. The tool consists of both hardware and software. The hardware is a medical-grade, wearable device that smoothly integrates into the athlete/patient workflow to enable physical therapists, sports scientists, and strength coaches to collect muscle activity data and movement data.
The software algorithm then processes this data, allowing these experts to understand compensation mechanisms, which exercises personalise training for an athlete’s specific sport, and how to use this knowledge to optimise technique, strength, and endurance development overtime for their specific athletes and use cases. The Oro System has already proven to increase the efficiency of training by 30% with Olympic-level teams.

Tanya Colonna has a passion for sports, health, technology, and entrepreneurship and is thankful for the opportunity to combine these in her venture, Oro Muscles. During her interview, Tanya told us that she believes that her company can really help move the healthcare industry towards injury prevention and telemedicine.
Apart from helping athletes with training and recovery, Colonna also highlights the fact that their business is proving value in a huge and growing healthcare market that badly needs at-home patient monitoring. This industry needs to collect long-term, at-home data for patients using medication and exercise to battle neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and for their physicians to better understand how the body is responding to treatment.
“Movement disorders and Parkinson’s is a $1 billion market and 1 out of 4 patients with Parkinson’s are misdiagnosed. We integrate our tool into a wearable that is comfortable for the patient so if they need to have movement and muscle activity data monitored in their daily life, we have a solution that fully integrates into their day-to-day activities; they won’t even notice that it’s on.”
Many movement-disorder patients live in the US, many of them live over an hour and a half away from their specialists. It’s already a movement impaired disease so to travel it’s really difficult and this could really help bring the clinician into their home.”
Thanks to Oro Muscles, coaches and athletes can see inside their muscles, measure their response to training, and develop personalized thresholds to guide decision-making and optimize human performance. This is scalable to all sports and has additional applications in orthopedic and neurological rehabilitation.
Finally, she concludes this interview by saying that this product can really move the sports and healthcare industries forward while improving patient quality of life. “It feels great to be the 2021 winner, I really didn’t expect it!”
About Med-Tech Pitch:
The inaugural edition of Med-Tech World Startup Pitch has just launched this November. Over 100 startups were selected to showcase their products and initiatives throughout the event. Each startup had a small booth at Med-Tech World, surrounded by top investors and mentors. However, only the judges’ top ten made it to the Pitch during the final leg of the summit.