Helping Hands Nuada II

Direct:

• Improved quality of life for people with reduced hand mobility: by returning hand mobility to its users, the glove allows them to perform tasks that would be difficult or impossible to perform in a comfortable way.
• Inclusion of people with hand mobility problems: the glove has a significantly lower cost when compared to the existing systems on the market (25% of the price charged by SEM Glove and NASA/GM). By being more affordable, it is accessible to more people. On top of this, its aesthetics (beautiful and discrete) help avoid any potential discriminatory situations towards people with any hand disability. Without making marketing efforts, the company has 1050 reservations to purchase the glove.
• Improved healthcare: the real-time data tracking that can be accessed and analyzed by the user or a healthcare professional, will improve the health care provided by allowing for a more customized and holistic treatment.

NUADA is a Portuguese company created to assure the development and commercial exploitation of the NUADA glove - a new type of intelligent and soft exoskeletons. The company has received several awards over the years for its flagship product.

The NUADA team is comprised of multidisciplinary profiles which gives them an essential set of competencies to achieve their goals and milestones.

The company has 11 team members, including Carolina Amorim (Project Manager), Rita Faro (Regulatory Affairs), one bio-engineer, two software developers, and one electronic engineer. The team is also supported by a great group of advisors that have great experience in all fields of the project, from Product development, Hardware, manufacturing, Software, Textiles, Industry markets, funding, and Healthcare markets. They are leaders of big companies, University groups, and Venture capital structures that will ensure that the Nuada team will always have the input of experts for all foreseeable challenges.

Why this name - Nuada?

"Nuada" was, according to legend, the king of the Celtic gods. During a battle, he lost his hand and part of his arm, ceasing to be perfect and, therefore, losing the possibility of being king of the gods. Another god replaced Nuada, Bres, who was oppressing and made his subjects very unhappy. However, the god of healing Dian Cecht made the Nuada a fully functional hand made of silver, restoring him to perfection and the possibility of resuming his reign. Back on the throne, Nuada freed his people from oppression. The impact that, in this story, a physical characteristic of a single individual has on the entire population is quite interesting. Thus, the name of the main character, Nuada Silverhand, served as inspiration for the name of our system!

The idea for the glove came to Filipe after he fractured his hand in a Jiu-jitsu class. The inspiration was born from what he felt with this injury: he noticed that his reduced mobility had a lot of consequences on his everyday life and the recovery time until he gained full hand mobility was too long – about 11 months.

During this period, while he was finishing his PhD in Biomedicine, in Universidade da Beira Interior, he decided to create a prototype with the help of two teachers to participate on the tech competition Microsoft Imagine Cup. In 2014, the entrepreneur won the European version of the same contest and was one of the finalists on the world edition, to which were only selected 10 teams worldwide.

In 2015, he participated in Startup Braga. In that year, already holding a patent, he founded the company to make the prototype functional. After that, the product started to be developed with Portuguese partners.

The company was represented in UTEN, an acceleration program in Texas, United States.

In 2016/2017, they were selected for the HAX hardware accelerator program, winning an acceleration program of 4 months in Shenzhen, China. Also in 2017, they closed two investment rounds, one from an American company from Silicon Valley.

In 2018, they were the Portugal winners of the StartJLM competition promoted by Israel and we won the EUtop50 SME award, received in the European Parliament.

In 2019, Nuada secured financing of 1.7 million euros from the European Union for Research and Development.

Without marketing efforts, they have a list of more than 300 companies (such as ElectroLux, Siemens, Volkswagen, Airbus, Skoda Auto, among others) that tried to buy the glove or book pilots. Some of these companies transitioned into partner companies, mainly based on size, market, and distance to their headquarters.

They are now in the phase of partner expansion and pilot booking to make sure the prototypes and products translate well into the global market and avoid regional strange data points. The most important proof of concept is with Auto-Europa, a Volkswagen factory in Portugal, where they are testing and integrating new specs in order to fulfil their requirements. Their engineering, medical and ergonomic teams have been really committed to the project in order to be able to scale to all of the Volkswagen Group.

In the healthcare sector, the company has more than 1000 individual contacts to try to solve users’ disabilities, all aligned with their product features and knowing the current price point.

They have over 10 distributors on their partner waiting list, which will play a huge part in their market extension.