Healthcare has become a growing concern, with technology playing an increasingly important role in making treatment and recovery more efficient. From diagnosis to rehabilitation, advanced solutions are helping patients access more personalised and engaging forms of care. Hyderabad-based healthtech startup BeAble Health is working in this space with technology-enabled rehabilitation solutions designed to make physiotherapy more intensive, interactive and engaging. CE speaks to Habib Ali, CEO and co-founder of BeAble Health, to understand how its flagship product, ArmAble, is transforming rehabilitation and what lies ahead for the company.
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Tell us about BeAble Health.
BeAble Health is a Hyderabad-based healthtech startup that we founded in 2017. Our main aim was to make physiotherapy and rehabilitation more effective and engaging for patients. I lead the company as CEO, along with my co-founder Sreehari KG, who heads our marketing and sales operations. At its core, BeAble builds technology-enabled rehabilitation solutions that help therapists deliver more intensive, repetitive and engaging therapy, while giving patients a more interactive way to practise and track their movements. The idea for BeAble Health incubated at IIT Hyderabad’s Centre for Healthcare Entrepreneurship (CfHE), where I spent close to a year shadowing doctors, therapists and patients to understand everyday challenges in healthcare. Among the hundreds of issues we documented, one recurring problem stood out — patients recovering from stroke found it particularly difficult to regain movement in their arms and hands. Therapists also did not have the time or devices to provide the intensive, repetitive practice that recovery demands. Conventional therapy can become repetitive and difficult for patients to sustain over a long period. That was the problem we wanted to solve. Our flagship product, ArmAble, is designed for stroke survivors, spinal cord injury patients and individuals with neurological conditions. It is currently used in more than 70 hospitals and rehabilitation centres across India.
What is ArmAble?
ArmAble is a game-based, AI-enabled rehabilitation device for the arm and hand. Instead of asking patients to perform the same repetitive exercise repeatedly, it turns those movements into simple and familiar games. This can make recovery feel less like a task and more like something the patient wants to engage with. For example, we have relatable games such as table tennis, chapati rolling, dosa making and mosquito swatting, with each game designed around a specific therapeutic objective. Balloon popping is another game on the device, specifically developed to improve functional reaching ability and shoulder rehabilitation. The idea grew out of what we observed at the centre. We also learnt that arm and hand recovery after a stroke is usually much slower than leg recovery. This is mainly because the parts of the brain that control the upper limbs are more complex to rewire.
To recover, patients may need anywhere between 300 and 600 repetitions of a single movement every day, and no therapist can manually supervise every repetition for every patient. We also looked at robotic devices that help patients move their arms, but that did not address the problem completely because meaningful recovery requires the patient’s brain and muscles to actively participate in the movement. That is why we turned to gamification. If we could design games around movements people already perform instinctively in everyday life, patients would not need extensive instructions and would be more willing to return to practise. That thought process became ArmAble.
How does the device work?
ArmAble uses sensors to track how a patient moves his/her arm and translates that movement into a game on the screen. Instead of a therapist simply counting repetitions, the patient’s movements control what happens in the game. We also incorporate bilateral training, where the stronger hand guides the weaker one, allowing both sides to work together during a physiotherapy session. On the software side, our platform, BeOne, captures this movement data. Using AI, it analyses movement patterns and adjusts the difficulty of the game in real time. This allows the exercise to become slightly harder or easier depending on how the patient is performing on a particular day. In our multi-centre clinical trial, patients using ArmAble showed close to 40% better recovery compared to conventional physiotherapy.
Would patients need training to use the device?
ArmAble is designed to be used under the guidance and instruction of a therapist rather than independently from day one. Initially, the therapist sets up the session, chooses the appropriate game and difficulty level based on the patient’s condition, and remains involved to guide and observe the patient. Because the games are deliberately designed around familiar movements, patients tend to pick them up quickly and do not require lengthy instructions once the therapist has demonstrated the movement. Over time, as patients become more confident and consistent, some centres use ArmAble as a semi-independent practice tool between formal sessions, within a supervised clinical setting.
What’s next?
Our next project scales gamification to a larger surface area with our upcoming product, Interact-able. It is a flexible, room-scale platform designed for walls, floors and fully immersive room setups. At its core, we are exploring how the brain perceives movement. We believe movement is the language of the brain. By studying how people respond to specific stimuli and how they move, we can gain deeper insights into brain function and neuroplasticity. While brain-computer interfaces help us understand what the brain is doing, we are building a brain-computer-body interface — one that not only decodes brain activity but also translates it into meaningful, measurable movement. That is the direction we are heading in.