A Growing Duty of Care; Is ‘Movement’ the New Vital Sign in Sport & Fitness?
A startup from Dublin, Ireland, believes the answer to that question is an emphatic, “Yes!”
KineMo uses AI to accurately track and quantify in 3D the angles of an individual’s joints during exercise and rehabilitation, using video from any single camera. They believe that understanding and objectively measuring the movement competency of an athlete during exercise should be at the forefront of athletic development. “It should be at least on a par with other performance metrics that are routinely tracked and quantified, like speed, power, strength.” The ability to do this accurately, on demand and at scale was up to now, beyond the reach of most sports, schools or practitioners. Where companies like KineMo can now provide this, there is, arguably, an emerging legal risk in ignoring movement screening among athlete & fitness populations and in particular in youth sports and developing athletes.
While there is no single federal law requiring movement screening before participation in sport or training, duty of care principles are well recognized in:
- Tort law: Coaches, athletic trainers, and institutions have a duty to act as a reasonable professional would to prevent foreseeable harm.
- High-school & collegiate athletics:
- The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) and NCAA require pre-participation medical exams, but these rarely include movement-quality or biomechanical screening.
- However, omitting reasonable risk screening (like ignoring obvious movement deficits) could expose a school, club, or trainer to negligence claims if an athlete is later injured in a foreseeable way.
- Professional standards: Strength & conditioning coaches certified by the NSCA or NASM are expected to perform movement assessments (e.g., overhead squat, push/pull balance) before prescribing load-bearing exercise.
So legally: it’s not mandated, but it’s increasingly expected as part of a reasonable standard of professional care.
To learn a little more about KineMo, which is currently closing an investment round, to scale up their offering in the US and elsewhere, we recently sat down with their CEO and Co-founder Leo Peyton.
Q: How did the idea for KineMo come about?
KineMo started from a real problem identified in elite sport in Ireland. Leinster Rugby, one of the top professional rugby clubs in the world, approached a Trinity College Dublin research team about the lack of scalable, practical solutions for accurately tracking athlete movement competency. The vast majority of coaches and clinicians still rely on observation or “feel,” and biomechanical labs are too expensive and limited to use widely. We were very lucky to be able to bring together a multi-disciplinary team across AI, Immersive realities, Biomechanics, Sports Injury Biomechanics, Sports Technology, to understand what a solution should look like and how we might leverage all the rapid developments in AI, computer vision and pose estimation to help. We had to find a way to combine the accuracy, consistency and biomechanical detail you might achieve in a motion capture lab with the ease of use and scalability of just recording an individual with your cell phone.
What began as a feasibility study in elite & grassroots sport soon also showed huge potential across occupational athletes (Defence, Policing, Astronauts etc.) healthcare, physiotherapy, and wellness. From this KineMo was born, we focused from day one on being accurate, consistent and detailed enough to make decisions on elite athletes but flexible and scalable enough to use across all these use cases. Critical for us, was to be science informed and peer reviewed in our approach and on all aspects of our underlying technology to give confidence in our platform to clients.
Q: What makes KineMo unique?
It is that combination of being accurate, biomechanically meaningful but highly scalable. KineMo uses any single camera, producing 3D whole body and biomechanically meaningful metrics comparable to a lab environment — but without the cost or complexity. Our system doesn’t just visualize motion; on each individual exercise we track, we worked hard with a team of world leaders in athletic development, youth athletic development, rehabilitation etc. to ensure we deliver detailed, consistent, and actionable insights on movement competency over time. We develop and train our own models, allowing us to extend KineMo across sports-specific skills, rehabilitation exercises, and occupational tasks. That accuracy, scalability, and ease to use — anywhere, indoors or outdoors —is what sets us apart.
Q: Who are your existing and prospective customers?
We’re already working with a wide range of partners — from elite sports teams like Leinster Rugby, soccer clubs in the Premier League in the UK and Serie A in Italy, to cricket, rugby, football, other sports governing bodies, with occupational athletes in the European Space Agency (Astronauts) and Defence. In health, longevity health and sports physiotherapy with organisations like IHLAD (Institute for Healthier Living Abu Dhabi, UAE) the first licensed longevity clinic in the world, to premier sports clinics in Europe. Also, with colleges and universities in Ireland, Switzerland and Austria tracking athlete’ communities across sport and research initiatives. All these practitioners are broadly interested in the same exercises and metrics to understand the quality of movement of the athletes, patients or individuals in their care. We now want to really scale out our footprint with these types of organization and bring the power of KineMo larger audiences.
And of course, longer term there are more opportunities in physiotherapy networks, wellness organizations, schools, gyms, and telehealth providers who want to objectively track and improve movement at scale. We’re also seeing strong interest from industries like insurance, pharma, and workplace wellbeing, where understanding human movement brings measurable value.
Q: How might KineMo impact the business and legal aspects of the sports industry?
On the business side, KineMo makes accurate data-driven movement analysis scalable, helping teams, clinics, and organizations make better decisions about athlete development, rehabilitation, and risk management. It reduces the reliance on subjective and biased assessment and provides consistent, transparent data across cohorts and timepoints. From a performance and injury prevention perspective combining KineMo with other performance metrics can help to inform better and more optimal strategies to improve performance, rehabilitation, or reduce the risk of future injury burden
From a legal and ethical perspective, that objectivity is powerful — it supports evaluations in areas like injury claims, insurance cover, return-to-play decisions, and talent identification. This is not only relevant for elite athletes, but also for academy and youth athletes where there is an even greater duty of care. Equally it has potential value for consumers and gym members where, as example, good movement could be a prerequisite to the use of certain equipment. At the same time, KineMo is built with a privacy-first design, ensuring that movement data is captured and handled responsibly. As AI becomes more embedded in sports and healthcare, that responsible approach is something we’re proud to lead on.
Our long-term vision is for any individual to have access to KineMo to view, track, gamify their own movement quality and competency during exercise. For parents to be able to see the quality, baseline movement of their kids during exercise, when they are lifting significant external load in a gym or rehabilitating back from injury. There are so many possibilities, it is a really exciting opportunity and one we feel will become more and more important
To connect with KineMo, go here, or through their website at https://www.kine-mo.com/