A person who spends most of their working life sitting at a desk will notice discomfort in their back long before any medical system does. They’ll notice stiffness, reduced movement in the chair, and a slower walk to the kitchen.
No healthcare system will catch it, until the day when they finally receive a diagnosis together with a treatment plan and a bill.
Much of the harm accumulates during this unmonitored period, a gap that comes from the absence of available data. What follows is well-documented: lower back pain is now the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting approximately 619 million people in 2020 and projected to reach 843 million by 2050.
Governments keep their own tallies because the cost does not stay with the individual. In the EU, musculoskeletal disorders, like damage to the muscles, joints, tendons and the spine, are the most frequent health complaints related to work.
According to the EU’s safety agency, EU-OSHA, they affect an estimated 45 million workers. In the case of Germany, it is recorded as the most costly of the illnesses monitored, linked to losses of roughly €17 billion in production and about €30 billion in economic output each year.
An entire industry has grown up around treating that pain once it is diagnosed. Building anything on the stretch before it, while the damage is still forming and still reversible, is a harder and newer challenge.
Where the money has gone
Almost all of the capital in digital musculoskeletal care has gone toward pain that already exists. Hinge Health, for example, which delivers physical therapy through an app, went public in 2025 and now trades at a market value near $4.3 billion USD (€3.86 billion), which makes app-based rehab one of the few digital-health models public markets have signed off on at scale.
Its main rival, Sword Health, spent $285 million (€256 million) in 2026 to buy the German company Kaia Health, according to Fierce Healthcare, a consolidation that pools both companies’ movement data to predict which patients are heading toward surgery and hands Sword a larger European footprint.
In August 2026, Flagler Health raised a $50 million (€44.7 million) Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, this time for the software layer underneath the clinics: triage, billing and outcome tracking built into medical records. Flagler puts annual U.S. spending on musculoskeletal care above $400 billion, which is the size of the market all of this is competing for.
What the three have in common matters more than what separates them. Each one starts working after an injury already exists, in the therapy plan, the referral queue or the pre-surgical workup. The stretch before that, the years when strain is building and could still be reversed, is where far less money and product have gone.
In health terms, that is the prevention side: acting on the conditions that lead to an injury rather than on the injury once a doctor names it. For back pain at work, prevention means the desk setup, the hours of sitting, and the movement a person does or does not get across the day.
Why prevention is the harder sell
Prevention has stayed in the smaller market for a plain reason: it is harder to fund. The buyer pays now for a cost that is spread over years and, until recently, carried no number at all.
A physical-therapy subscription competes against a bill the company already books each month; a sensor on a desk competes against a problem the company has never quantified, for an injury that may be years away and may never be traced back to the desk.
In sum, treatment has a clear line item, but prevention has to create one.
That is the gap DeepCare, a German company, is trying to close.
The hours before the injury
DeepCare’s product is an AI coach named Isa, which uses an on-device 3D sensor to read posture, movement, light, air quality, noise and drinking habits at a person’s desk across the working day, and processes none of it as personal data, according to the company. The premise it is selling is that the working day itself has never been measured.
“Knowledge workers spend eight to ten hours a day at a desk, which is the root cause of massive health issues and trillions in costs, and until now that time went completely unmeasured,” said Milad Geravand, DeepCare’s CEO.
Geravand frames the main obstacle as awareness rather than price. “Most people don’t yet know the problem is even measurable,” he said.
On the current evidence he has a case. Continuous, automated tracking of how a person actually sits and moves through a workday is still early: the computer-vision and sensor methods behind it sit mostly in pilot studies and clinical trials rather than in wide use.
The standard corporate responses, an adjustable desk, an ergonomic chair, a training session, have a thin record in the research, with reviews finding little conclusive evidence that they lower the risk of musculoskeletal pain, in part because there was never granular data on what workers were doing at their desks to begin with. That absence is the space DeepCare is trying to occupy.
The move it is making has already played out elsewhere in health technology. Continuous glucose monitors began as tools for people with diagnosed diabetes and are now sold to people without it, as a way to catch metabolic trouble years before a lab result would flag it. Consumer ECG features turned heart-rhythm screening from a clinic appointment into something that runs in the background.
Prevention-first health companies in Europe have also started to raise serious money on that logic, led by Sweden’s Neko Health, which took in $260 million in 2025 for full-body early-detection scans. Very little of that capital has reached desk-time musculoskeletal risk, which is roughly the space DeepCare is trying to define.
Its own numbers come from a study of Isa users that the company ran. In it, absence days tied to musculoskeletal complaints fell from an average of 5.4 to 2.4 per person a year, and a combined measure of absenteeism and presenteeism improved by 58%.
Absence days are the figure an employer already sees on a spreadsheet, which is the number a preventive tool has to move to win a budget line against a treatment bill it can point to.
DeepCare works with more than 300 employers across Europe and the U.S., and is now pushing deeper into the American market, with over 40 more companies there in advanced discussions, according to the company.
The shape of the market is clear enough. The problem is large and growing, the money and the products sit almost entirely on the treatment side, and the prevention side is thin, early—and mostly European.
What happens next turns on a few things. Whether prevention-side capital starts reaching workplace musculoskeletal risk the way it has reached metabolic and cardiac health; whether the incumbents move upstream themselves, since Hinge Health and Sword Health already hold the kind of movement data that could flag strain long before it becomes a surgery; and whether continuous measurement of the workday holds up beyond a single company’s numbers, which is the part the whole prevention case still rests on.
“You can’t really improve what you never measure,” Geravand concluded.
Featured image: Getty Images via Unsplash+
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
