A Sudbury, Ont. company says its machine can help athletes reduce their risk of concussion

An athletic therapist with a practice at Laurentian University says concussions are far too commonplace among athletes.

"There was one year here at Laurentian where we had two-thirds of our female basketball team out with concussions," said Kim Brouzes.

Now Brouzes is also the CEO of a startup called Kinmetrix. She hopes their device will help expand our understanding of concussions, and help prevent them by strengthening athletes' neck muscles.

"There is research out there that dictates for every pound of neck strength, it reduces the severity of concussions by five per cent," she said.

"We know that if we increase the strength in extension, we can decrease the severity of that concussion by 13 per cent."

Through her career as an athletic therapist, Brouzes has worked closely with the Sudbury Wolves OHL team and several NHL players.

She's using those connections to bring the Kinmetrix Arc, as their device is called, to professional and college sports teams, including Chicago's NHL team, and clinics to cater to pro athletes.

"I was able to and continue to target the high-end athletes, not that they need it more but they have the optics and the traction that I need to get this information and this device out," she said.

The device looks like a seated exercise machine with an arc-shaped arm at the top that has one padded end. An operator – often a sports therapist or physiotherapist – can set the resistance on the arm using a tablet, and then measures the athlete's neck strength.

Once they set a baseline they can build a training program with the machine to work on those muscles.

Nick Foligno, currently a forward with Chicago's NHL team, is a brand ambassador for the company and knows firsthand  the impact concussions can have on athletes.

"I've had two myself," he said.

"Until you've really had one and been diagnosed with one do you really know how different it feels, and honestly, how debilitating it is."

Foligno and his younger brother Marcus, who currently plays for the Minnesota Wild, have been longtime clients with Brouzes' practice.

"It takes time and research and people like Kim and our group to really think forward and that's why I'm so excited about this," he said.

"I think it's going to really help a lot of people and get this word that we use, concussion, maybe not be such a scary word."

Sudbury investment

Bill Smith, a chiropractor from Nova Scotia, started a company and product called Neck Tronics, which later became Kinmetrix.

"He basically invented a device out of frustration of being in his office and having to deal with insurance companies and patients and not really having a very good quantitative measure of how weak the neck is, where the neck is weak, and more importantly, how to strengthen it once you discover that there's a problem," said Dennis Reich, the owner of Kinmetrix.

Because Smith was unable to secure the financing he needed in Nova Scotia, Reich, who is also a family physician in Sudbury, says he connected with him.

"Sudbury has this amazing ecosystem and health and wellness technology and an entrepreneurial ecosystem that encourages companies to locate here," Reich said.

"It has funds available including one called the Sudbury Catalyst Fund."

Reich became the company's main investor. Earlier this month the company secured $250,000 in financing from the Sudbury Catalyst Fund to help it hire more staff to conduct research and upgrade the machine's software.

Reich says we're still in the "dark ages" of being able to assess concussions and determine the strengthening needed to prevent them.

But he hopes their device helps improve that understanding.