The Story of Figur8: Building the Future of Musculoskeletal Health Measurement

Sometimes the most impactful companies start with an unexpected connection. For Figur8 founder Nan-Wei Gong, that connection was between electronic music and healthcare.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Nan-Wei shared how her journey from classical violin to MIT’s Media Lab set the foundation for what would become a healthcare technology breakthrough. “I’ve always wanted to be a musician and classically trained. I played violin,” she explains. “And my group is big on designing music interfaces… my advisor built the first smart shoes for dancers to create their own music.”

But it wasn’t just about making music. The real breakthrough came when Massachusetts General Hospital approached the lab with a problem: their existing movement measurement equipment was too cumbersome and restrictive. As Nan-Wei recalls, “Mass general called him in early 2000 and said, you know what? We have all these equipment that is impossible to capture the patients or even athletes movement properly when there are all these cables around them.”

This challenge sparked a vision: what if they could make computers small enough to eliminate the need for cables? The concept of wearable computing was born, pioneered by Nan-Wei’s group at the Media Lab.

Seven years ago, Nan-Wei saw an opportunity. Battery technology had improved, wireless computing had advanced, and most importantly, “the time is right for people to accept the concept of wearable computers.” She decided to commercialize the decades of research into something practical.

The goal was ambitious but clear: “The early days really is looking at how we can design something so that we can reduce the cost of existing equipment, like a biomechanics lab, to less than 10% of the cost, 5% of the cost. And how do we reduce the time of running these assessments? Normally, it takes 4 hours in the lab to ten minutes.”

Initially, Figur8 focused on professional sports, developing solutions for biomechanics labs that typically cost around a quarter million dollars to set up. The company was gaining traction, even set to be used in the Olympic village – until COVID-19 forced a pivot.

“We did a hard pivot into healthcare, which is a long term target that we know is always there,” Nan-Wei shares. This pivot, while challenging, aligned perfectly with a personal experience that validated the market need. During COVID, Nan-Wei developed a frozen shoulder condition. The experience highlighted a crucial gap in physical therapy: “If you go to a clinic, that is when you don’t have a broken bone, the only thing that they can do for you is through experience, through manual tests on how much you can move… you just don’t know if you’re making progress.”

Today, Figur8’s solution combines hardware, software, apps, and data analytics to help physical therapists quantify patient progress and demonstrate treatment value to both patients and insurance companies. They’ve expanded to 15 states, working with multiple physical therapy clinics.

Looking ahead, Nan-Wei’s vision is clear: “We are really on track to disrupt it in this space of having a standard of measurement for musculoskeletal health.” She sees Figur8 becoming the standard of care, ensuring that when patients undergo physical therapy, they’ll “be able to know whether your treatment is working or not with high confidence and communicate the progress with data as opposed to just the best guess from the clinician.”

This vision represents more than just business success – it’s about transforming a crucial aspect of healthcare that affects millions of people. From its origins in music and movement to its future as a healthcare standard, Figur8’s story demonstrates how technology can bridge unexpected gaps to solve fundamental human problems.