For decades, healthcare has relied on five vital signs to understand our health: blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, respiration and weight. But there is one more indicator that is heavily overlooked: how we move.
Grasshopper Health was founded to change that.
Born through research findings inside a nationally-recognized biomechanics lab, Grasshopper Health is leading a movement to establish gait as the sixth vital sign to redefine how chronic disease is monitored and managed.
Early studies led by researchers at the University of Nebraska at Omaha revealed that subtle variations in gait could signal early neurological, vascular and cognitive decline, often years before disease symptoms appear. Their work became the first published evidence that gait changes were associated with peripheral artery disease, even before symptom onset, a finding later published in Nature Scientific Reports.
This insight caught the attention of several healthcare leaders, including the University of Nebraska System President, Dr. Jeffrey Gold, who saw its potential to transform early detection. That’s when Dr. Gold reached out to entrepreneur and computer scientist Richard Vlasimsky, now CEO of Grasshopper Health, whose background in AI-driven diagnostics made him uniquely positioned to translate the research into a scalable clinical solution.
“Gait speed is one of the most well-studied indicators associated with long-term health outcomes,” said Vlasimsky. “Even if I knew your BMI, research shows gait speed correlates more strongly with five-year outcomes than many traditional measures.”
- Richard Vlasimsky, Grasshopper Health co-founder & Chief Executive Officer
That single insight became the foundation for Grasshopper Health.
Together with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Dr. Fadi Alsaleem, a leading researcher in AI-integrated MEMS hardware, the team developed the Axis Patch™*, a small, sacrum-based wearable patch designed to capture continuous, real-world gait data with high-fidelity motion data.
Unlike traditional gait assessments that rely on brief, subjective observations in a clinic, the Axis Patch™* enables:
“You get the accuracy of a sophisticated gait lab, but with a device any patient can use whether they’re rural, remote or have no access to specialty care,” said Lance Stewart, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer.
Stewart also emphasizes a long-standing challenge in gait assessments in which patients often perform differently in a lab than they do in real life.
“In a gait lab, it’s their Olympic-athlete moment. But is that really how they move every day? Grasshopper brings gait measurement back to the patient’s real world.”
- Lance Stewart, Grasshopper Health co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer
Our healthcare system faces a significant gap where we detect disease too late and measure it too infrequently.
Gait offers a solution because it:
Grasshopper Health is initially focused on four high-impact conditions:
These life-changing conditions affect millions globally and all of them have strong, well-documented associations with gait.
“Someone very close to me spent four years trying to understand why she was falling,” shared Vlasimsky. “There was suspicion of normal pressure hydrocephalus, but not a strong diagnostic indicator. She’s now bedbound. When you lose the ability to walk, it’s not a good outcome. We’re going to do something about that.”
Grasshopper Health has been proud to collaborate with leading foundations, academic medical centers and technology innovators. Our partners help advance the science, clinical insight and real-world application of continuous gait monitoring.
Grasshopper Health is helping build a future where gait is recognized, measured and acted upon as a standard vital sign by working side by side with leaders in Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s research, peripheral artery disease, normal pressure hydrocephalus, rehabilitation science, biomechanics and aging.
Across all our collaborations, we share an important belief: movement is a window into human health and opening it can drastically change outcomes for the better.
Grasshopper Health is preparing for multicenter clinical trials conducted under the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) real-world evidence protocol. These studies will generate the data needed for a 510(k) submission and will evaluate clinical monitoring indications.
The company’s long-term roadmap also includes expanding into additional conditions; more than 20 diseases have known gait associations as well as adjacent fields like sports medicine and physical therapy.
“Healthcare will be transformed more than any other industry as a result of AI,” said Vlasimsky. “We need more effective and efficient ways to deliver quality care. We’re focused on that from a mobility perspective.”
Grasshopper Health’s vision is simple: A future where gait is recognized, measured and acted upon as a standard vital sign to enable earlier and more objective monitoring and longer, healthier independence.
In the months ahead, Grasshopper Health will share new research, partner stories and expert insights shaping this work. We’re grateful to the clinicians, researchers, advisors and early supporters who helped bring this vision to life, and we’re optimistic for what’s to come.
If you’re interested in helping make gait the sixth vital sign or want to see how the Axis Patch™* can help your patients, Grasshopper Health is always open to partnering with more clinical researchers, health systems, investors and clinicians.
Join us in redefining what’s possible through movement.
*The Axis Patch™ is currently intended for research use only.