Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
On the face of it, there is not much to connect the villainous Snoke, Supreme Leader of the First Order, in the Star Wars movie The Last Jedi and a Premier League footballer with a nagging hamstring injury.
However, the same motion-capture technology used to create villains in the Star Wars movies is being used to help elite athletes recover from sports injuries.
Vitrue Health, a healthtec start-up, uses sophisticated computer vision software to assess how sportsmen and others are moving. In many ways, it’s a more advanced version of the running gait technology which some sports shops use to help you buy the right pair of running shoes.
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However, it’s a long way from Snoke’s home planet of Exegol to a Starbucks in Camden, where Vitrue Health founder Dr Shane Lowe and his partner Alex Haslehurst spent six months eking out cups of tea while they developed Vitrue Health.
Dr Lowe finished his PhD in biomechanics at NUI Galway in 2012, creating an algorithm predicting a person’s future ability to move based on how they are moving today.
He then