As China begins to enter the stage of an aging society, the demand for domestic nursing care has grown significantly. At present, the elderly population aged 60 and above in China is about 249 million, accounting for 17.9% of the total population, of which about 40 million are disabled or partially disabled.
At the same time, the incidence of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases has also shown an explosive growth trend. The "China Cardiovascular Disease Health and Disease Report 2019" data survey released in 2020 shows that the number of Chinese residents with cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases has reached 330 million. Among them, cardiovascular diseases represented by stroke often cause different degrees of disability. According to the survey and statistics of the World Health Organization, the incidence of stroke in China ranks first in the world, with an annual growth rate of 8.7%. About four-thirds of stroke survivors are accompanied by disabilities of varying degrees.
Under the interactive influence of the two, medical rehabilitation aids have become a blue ocean market to be tapped.
Recently, Fourier Intelligent, a Chinese smart rehabilitation company, completed a D-round financing of 400 million yuan. This round of financing was led by Softbank Vision Fund Phase 2, followed by Saudi Aramco’s venture capital fund Prosperity7 Ventures and Yuanjing Capital. Gu Jie, founder and CEO of Fourier Intelligence, said that this round of financing will be used for the research and development of intelligent robot technology, and accelerate the implementation and popularization of rehabilitation robot products on a global scale.
What is certain is that behind the optimistic capital, the value of the exoskeleton robot market is also emerging.
"Revolutionary" in the rehabilitation industry
The company that completed the financing this time, Fourier Intelligence, was established in 2015 as an intelligent robot company.
According to the company's official website, Fourier Intelligence is a high-tech enterprise that provides the world's leading comprehensive intelligent rehabilitation solutions for medical institutions and patients based on the independent research and development of core rehabilitation robot technology.
The company is headquartered in Zhangjiang, Shanghai. At the same time, it has set up a regional headquarters in Singapore. It has R&D and production layouts in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Zurich and Chicago, and has established a global R&D, production and service network. The rehabilitation robots independently developed by the company have been exported to dozens of countries and regions, and settled in more than 1,000 institutions at home and abroad.
The company's vision is to promote rehabilitation services to gradually achieve informatization, standardization, and intelligence through the use of technologies including rehabilitation robots, thereby promoting the upgrading and transformation of traditional rehabilitation medicine to modern rehabilitation medicine, and ultimately enabling everyone to enjoy rehabilitation.
At present, Fourier Intelligence has formed an integrated precision rehabilitation medical service platform based on rehabilitation robots as the core of "Smart Rehabilitation Port", and has formed a large-scale application in the rehabilitation industry.
It is understood that Fourier Intelligence started from the field of rehabilitation robots, and is now able to provide B-end customers such as rehabilitation institutions with comprehensive intelligent rehabilitation solutions, involving intelligent rehabilitation products, physical therapy equipment, and digitization of rehabilitation medical care, etc., to build a closed loop of intelligent rehabilitation diagnosis and treatment system.
In addition, Fourier Intelligence has independently developed core technologies and components such as force feedback technology platforms, multi-joint robot motion control cards, and multi-dimensional force sensors. It is reported that the intelligent rehabilitation robot developed based on the force feedback technology platform simulates rich mechanical effects with precise force control to achieve compliant mechanical control. According to the user's situation, the corresponding auxiliary force is output to guide the user to carry out task-oriented interactive training.
In 2021, Fourier Intelligence was successfully selected as a national specialized and new "little giant" enterprise. The company has taken the lead in undertaking nearly 20 national and provincial R&D projects.
for recovery, but not only
As mentioned above, with the increase in the proportion of disabled elderly people brought about by the aging population and the disability problems caused by cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, the domestic rehabilitation demand base is huge, but the supply and demand are extremely unbalanced.
According to public data, in 2019, the number of people aged 65 and over in my country reached 176 million; the number of disabled people reached more than 85 million; and the number of chronic diseases reached 300 million. As of 2018, there is a shortage of 25,000 physicians for rehabilitation therapists in China.
Since rehabilitation is highly dependent on manpower, it is difficult to achieve a major breakthrough in efficiency. Based on this premise, intelligent rehabilitation diagnosis and treatment solutions represented by rehabilitation robots have begun to enter the market.
According to the forecast of Grand View Research, the compound annual growth rate of generalized rehabilitation robots will be about 37% in the next five years, among which the compound annual growth rate of rehabilitation robots will be 21%, and the compound annual growth rate of exoskeleton robots will be 47%, which is much higher than that of other categories. The average growth rate of medical robots.
From the perspective of application scenarios, rehabilitation robots will effectively alleviate the plight of lack of existing rehabilitation resources. At the same time, in the context of the continuous increase in the number of physically disabled people in China, exoskeleton robots that assist the human body to perform limb movements and realize walking and rehabilitation have potential market advantages. The exoskeletonization of rehabilitation robots has become an industry trend. For example, Rewalk Robotics, a foreign rehabilitation exoskeleton robot company, was once called "the next Tesla" and successfully went public in 2014.
In addition, exoskeleton robots also have a broad market vision in the pan-industrial field. In the field of freight transport, due to the irregular quantity of goods, manual handling is required. With the help of exoskeleton robots, the use of strength by workers will be greatly reduced. This mode is equivalent to converting the diagnosis and treatment stage of rehabilitation robots into the prevention stage. With the help of exoskeletons, on the one hand, it can help reduce occupational injuries that may be caused to workers due to high intensity during the working process, and it can also help companies improve production efficiency.
At present, the development direction of bone companies at home and abroad is mainly concentrated in the medical field. In addition to Fourier Intelligence, which has received financing this time, there are also related robot companies such as Maibu Robot and Buffalo Robot, but the actual commercialization is relatively relatively foreign. The market is at a low level.
In foreign markets, there have been listed companies such as Cyberdyne and Eksobionics that focus on the R&D and sales of exoskeleton robots. International companies including LG and Honda have also deployed exoskeleton robots. It is widely used in high-level scenes.
It is worth noting that although the market demand is huge and the growth is accelerating under the blessing of capital, the industry generally faces the problem of high costs. Take Rewalk, Cyberdyne and Ekso Bionics, three listed rehabilitation exoskeleton robot companies abroad, as examples. The unit price of their products is as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even in 2016, the first insurance company in the United States added exoskeleton machinery to the scope of insurance reimbursement, but the high cost price also made the large-scale marketization of exoskeleton robots a stumbling block.
Even with the potential value of great potential, the reality that it is difficult to commercialize has prevented the exoskeleton robot market from exploding on a large scale.
Future vision of "human mechanization"
Exoskeleton robots that may still exist in sci-fi movies in the general public's perception have actually experienced a century of development.
The concept of exoskeleton was born in the 19th century. Its main function is to use mechanical technology to expand, enhance or even replace human body functions by adding it to the wearer. With the advancement of technology, with the blessing of new technologies such as materials, computers, and artificial intelligence, exoskeleton robot technology has developed by leaps and bounds.
In addition to the medical field mentioned above, exoskeleton technology also has sufficient market space in the pan-industrial field. For example, some OEMs such as Ford have already applied related technologies. According to a research report by ABI Research, the fast-growing exoskeleton market is expected to exceed $5 billion in annual revenue in the next 10 years.
Although the unmanned factory is recognized as the future trend, all operations are performed by machines, and humans are only as assistants as engineers. But in some positions, machines may not be able to completely replace human beings.
In some detailed production scenarios, such as aviation, automobiles, home appliances and other scenarios that require a lot of human participation, humans are still an indispensable key node. In foreign markets, industrial exoskeleton robots are mainly oriented to high labor-intensive application industries such as logistics, logging, emergency rescue and disaster relief, and have not yet opened up demand within the market.
From the perspective of long-term development, exoskeleton robots obviously have long-term information mining value. Whether it is the acceleration of exoskeleton robots for the digital upgrading of industrial industries, or the reduction of high-intensity work, it will provide sufficient help for the safe production of workers.
In fact, the business boundaries in the industry have been broken. From robots to pan-bionic robot platforms, rehabilitation robot companies represented by Fourier Intelligence are redefining the boundary differences between machinery and industrial development and market changes. With the accelerated landing of related technologies on the consumer side, the era of co-development of humans and machines seems to be approaching us at a speed visible to the naked eye.
However, the current industry has not yet fully resolved the technical pain points. Even today, exoskeleton devices still have technical limitations such as excessive weight, low battery life, and poor collaborative algorithms.
In the short term, there is still a long way to go before realizing a highly intelligent and lightweight future vision similar to "Iron Man". In the future vision of technology aiming forward, it is believed that more advanced and more flexible exoskeleton robot products will be put on the market, setting off a "human mechanization" revolution in human history.
Article source: New Industry Insights