CoMoveIT wins the Ludo Lievens Award for Best Start-up Journey

CoMoveIT's technology lets people with severe motor impairments, including spasticity and involuntary movement, steer a powered wheelchair with more confidence and independence. The company grew out of years of interdisciplinary work at KU Leuven Campus Bruges, where Prof. Elegast Monbaliu, Prof. Hans Hallez and Prof. Jean-Marie Aerts brought together rehabilitation science, engineering and biosystems research around one clinical question: how do you give someone reliable control over a wheelchair when their own movements aren't reliable? Co-founders Frederik Vervenne and Sotirios Gakopoulos, backed by KU Leuven Research & Development, turned that question into KU Leuven's first spin-off from the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, and the technology has since grown from academic prototype to a system used by wheelchair manufacturers worldwide.

The result pairs self-learning algorithms with sensitive sensors, reading a user's movement patterns closely enough to steer accurately around spasticity or involuntary motion. Comate contributed mechanical engineering, styling and risk management on CoMoveIT Smart and CoMoveIT Flex, with Smart also winning a Henry van de Velde Award.