PAL Technologies is a spin-out from the Bioengineering Unit, University of Strathclyde. The Unit (now the Department of Biomedical Engineering) has an exceptional reputation for cross-disciplinary research and innovation and has produced a range of commercially successful healthtech innovations..
PAL Technologies was established in 2001 and the three founders, Douglas Maxwell, Nikos Mourselas and Malcolm Granat, are still involved and bring a range of complementary skills to the company.
PAL Technologies, from its headquarters in Glasgow, Scotland, supports researchers and clinicians at more than 200 institutions worldwide. Many of the researchers and clinicians are using PAL’s technologies to investigate the correlation between physical behaviours and chronic disease to help inform treatment interventions and chronic disease risk.
The core technology behind the PAL family of products has been developed and refined over a number of years in both patient groups and unimpaired subject populations.
Researchers and clinicians found that although they could easily measure the walking skills and exercise tolerance of their patients and subjects in the laboratory, this told them little about the type and level of activities they actually did when they were at home or work. As self-report diaries can be less than reliable, PAL undertook to develop simple and unobtrusive technologies to accurately describe posture allocation and free-living activity in order to provide the researchers, clinicians and anyone else with an interest in quantifying sedentary, upright and ambulatory activities with the detailed outcomes they required.