Before a medical innovation from the Brightlands Health Campus reaches the patient, a great deal of business and organizational work needs to be done. This process can easily take ten years, as representatives from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and scientists heard during a presentation in Maastricht on Thursday. The campus is expanding and allocating more space for SMEs.
Maastricht (NL) — Millions of people worldwide suffer from balance disorders. In the best-case scenario, they can walk with a cane. But there are also children who, without assistance, cannot go outside at all—let alone ride a bike. For them, Professor of Clinical Vestibulology Herman Kingma came up with an idea around fifteen years ago: a belt, now marketed under the name BalanceBelt. “So that you fall less easily and feel more confident.”
The BalanceBelt, essentially a balance belt, is a belt equipped with sensors and software that instructs the wearer’s brain to maintain balance. Kingma’s team approached Maastricht Instruments, a company affiliated with the Health Campus, which develops prototypes with a team of thirty engineers: the first step in assessing whether a scientific idea can be turned into a product.
Billiard Cloth
Patrick Machiels, director of Maastricht Instruments, recalls that the first prototype in 2013 was made from a piece of billiard cloth by the mother of a researcher. “When more parties and hospitals began showing interest, we continued development. Eventually, we had a belt that cost us €12,000. Patients in the first clinical trials were so enthusiastic that they wanted to pay for it themselves.”
The belt was then transferred in 2018 to the SME company Elitac, which specializes in combining textiles and electronics, and further refined it under the brand name BalanceBelt. In 2021, the invention received the necessary certification and was placed into a separate private company. Convincing hospitals and insurers can easily take several more years, says Charles Pallandt of Elitac.
Children’s Hospital
Pallandt: “Clinicians don’t easily abandon existing treatment methods. Even now, the BalanceBelt isn’t reimbursed by all health insurers, because they still need to be convinced of its cost-effectiveness. Currently, BalanceBelt is not yet part of the standard healthcare package. On top of that, medical device approval differs from country to country. We are now allowed to enter the European market. At a children’s hospital in London, we saw that young patients were able to go outside again thanks to our belt. That really gets to you.”
The production cost was reduced from €12,000 to well under €1,000. This became possible thanks to collaboration with an SME on the Bouwberg business park in Brunssum: AIM acts as an independent partner for the production of medical devices and works with companies around the world. The company, which has 55 employees, ensures a reliable supply chain, quality assurance, and final assembly, says sales & engineering manager Emile Arnoldussen.
Arnoldussen points to an image of a device that keeps the temperature in operating rooms at 37 degrees Celsius: “We help start-ups and scale-ups that are a step further along, with cost optimization among other things—but many of our clients are international players. Together with the Health Campus and partners, we also brought the Vibrobot to market: a robot used for complex research.”
The Health Campus has a team that helps develop revenue models for scientific ideas, and it also aims to attract more companies in the medical and life sciences sectors. This would allow ideas to be realized more quickly. In the meantime, 139 companies are now based there, including major players like Medtronic. The City of Maastricht has worked with Brightlands to support expansion. In recent years, some companies had to relocate to Chemelot due to a lack of space. Maastricht city councilor Hubert Mackus says that “significant investment” is being made into the campus at Randwyck: “We hope to attract many more SME companies and are also creating physical space to accommodate them.”