A game-changing gait lab in a shoe

A person's gait, or how they stand and walk, can reveal valuable information about their health. With older patients especially, these metrics are important, as they can help doctors monitor stroke rehabilitation or assess dementia risk. However, getting a full picture of a patient's gait—not just their step cadence and weight distribution, but also lower limb kinematics—requires costly labs and months of labor-intensive, in-person tests. The burden on both patients and doctors is immense.

Recent Johns Hopkins University biomedical engineering master's program graduate Junjen Chen, Engr '20, '24 (MS), and Anway Pimpalkar, who will earn his master's degree in biomedical engineering later this month, are leading a team aiming to make gait analysis as simple as putting on one's shoes. Chen and Pimpalkar co-founded Re-Kinesis, a wearable foot sensor that collects comprehensive gait metrics from its wearers. The product was named a finalist in the National Institute on Aging's 2025 Start-Up Challenge, which recognizes researchers and entrepreneurs who have built innovative, science-driven technologies with the potential to advance the fields of aging and interventions for age-related diseases.

Along with Chen and Pimpalkar, the Re-Kinesis team includes technical mentors Nitish Thakor, Ariel Slepyan, and Samuel Bello; clinical mentors Preeti Raghavan, Ryan Roemmich, and Jennifer Schrack; and industry and business mentors Rahul Kaliki, Christina DeMur, and Jason Troutner.

Chen and Pimpalkar met when they both worked as TAs for Thakor's Principles of Design of Biomedical Instrumentation course. There, they were introduced to one of Thakor's advisees, PhD student Ariel Slepyan, an electrical engineering expert who had designed high-resolution, high-speed touch sensors. Wondering how they could put these sensors to practical use, they met with Raghavan, a stroke rehab physician, who inspired them to make gait assessment more accessible.

Or, as Pimpalkar put it, "What if we took the whole lab and shrunk it down to your shoe?"

Ordinarily, conducting gait assessments requires patients to use a treadmill in a large room equipped with cameras on all sides. While data collected from specialized lab setups is accurate, doctors and patients rarely have access to it due to high costs, complexity, and difficulty in scheduling appointments. Therefore, similar data collected by Re-Kinesis sensors—a wearable gait lab that patients can easily use outside the clinic—is a game changer.

"It essentially democratizes gait sensing for underserved and underrepresented aging and economically disadvantaged populations," says Chen.

With support from the National Science Foundation I-Corp and Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, The Re-Kinesis team was able to develop an award-winning product. They were chosen alongside 20 other finalists from a pool of around 300 applicants, receiving $10,000 to further develop their insoles. All finalists will also participate in a summer accelerator program at the NIA, where they'll work on refining their products and taking them from the lab to the market.

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"We have been matched with entrepreneurial and clinical mentors by the NIA, who will be helping us progress toward our goals. In the end, it's up to us to leverage these connections and resources to the fullest," says Pimpalkar. "Regardless of whether we win the grand prize, it's going to be a fruitful experience for us and everyone else on the team."

In the meantime, the team is busy developing a user-friendly interface for doctors and patients to view data collected from the insoles. They're also interviewing potential customers, ranging from hospitals in the area to the U.S. Military Academy's sports medicine division.

"This has been a remarkable journey," Chen says, "It took us years to build Re-Kinesis from the ground up and we're finally gaining traction. We're excited to keep pushing Re-Kinesis ahead with such a great team and to make an even greater impact!"