Sooner or later everybody falls? 😳

But the Finch is coming to put a kink on that.

While some falls are nearly inevitable, most are not.

Outside the city of Thebes dwelled the daughter of Orthus and Chimera.

With a human head and the body of the lion, she also had the wings of an eagle and the tail of a serpent.

The Sphinx.

She would ask a famous riddle to all travelers before letting them pass:

Which is the creature that has one voice but has four feet in the morning, two feet in the afternoon, and three feet at night?

All that struggled answering were devoured by the monster, but Oedipus was a clever one.

He said:

The man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two as an adult and needs a cane when old.

And with that, the Sphinx threw herself off the cliff into her own demise.

The riddle of the Sphinx is a perfect allegory to describe the human journey through life and the gradual changes that inevitably happen to us sooner or later.

Although much is still to be understood, from a genetic to a biochemical perspective, from a birds-eye-view (pun intended, 🤷🏼‍♀️) things have been quite clear. And from an analog perspective, measured.

We have come to understand that a person's pace of walking, for example, is a clinically defining measure that reflects one’s joviality. And some researchers have described the gait (walking), for example, as a vital sign, such as the body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate. Perhaps one day we will be able to link the decline of our walking pace to aging mitochondria, that riddled with free radicals and oxidants, no longer generate the energy they once did, or the turning on and off of some of our genes for reasons yet unknown, or the gradual loss of telomere length and so on.

Who knows what we will learn in the future?

All we do know is that most of our knowledge will always be found there.

Besides the pace of the gait, there are multiple other signs your movement specialist (be it the physical therapist, the neurologist, or other professionals) identifies as factors that can indicate one's functional level.

This measuring is mostly analog.

And what we mean by analog is they are measured by a human.

A trained observer.

And for a [very] short period (usually just a few minutes).

And to make matters [scientifically] worse: the subject knows is being observed.

And from that brief event, which usually involves pen and paper, a stopwatch, and a measuring tape, conclusions are made. 🤔

Conclusions such as fall risk, frailty level, health and lifespan speculations, and even diagnosing of disease and dysfunction sometimes. It may dictate if your health insurance will cover a certain procedure or not, or even inform the surgeon on which procedure you are most likely to tolerate or benefit from.

Very analog indeed.

Flawed, in our opinion.

Yet, the best we have had.

Finch is coming to bring us to the Digital Era.

Yes, comes a point we may all need to use a cane, like the three feet creature pointed by the Sphinx, but we want to know exactly when and after we exhausted all other remedying options.

Armin Loges

Founder of Finch