Knobzz — an intelligent therapy device for myofascial trigger points.
The client came with a patent application and a concept. Nothing physical existed. We developed the product from the ground up — electronics, firmware, enclosure, application and cloud — and delivered working units.
Knobzz UK Ltd is a London startup founded by an osteopath who has worked with myofascial trigger points since 1990 and wrote the reference text most practitioners learn them from.
He came to us with three decades of clinical judgement, a patent application for the mechanism, and one question that turns a therapy into an engineering brief.
“Could a device learn to touch like a therapist?”
A therapist finds a trigger point by feel. A device has to find it by measurement.
Tissue hardness is inferred from force at the treatment head as it works across the target area. A candidate point is identified where force rises at the same depth of indentation.
The head must then hold position on soft, moving tissue while applying a defined pressure profile — ramp, hold, release — and adapting as the tissue gives way.
Sensing, actuation, heating, timing and safety all constrain the system. None of it existed yet.
We took the mechanism as given and developed everything around it, in two form factors: a twin-head unit for the limbs and larger muscle groups, and a supported unit for the lower back and neck. One underlying architecture shared across both.
A clinical technique, now engineered into a working product.