Imen MAAROUFI Co-founder and chief strategy officer of Point Motion

I am an entrepreneur, art lover, and technology enthusiast. I am absolutely Tunisian. And I could say that even though I lived in so many places in the world, I could say that I identify myself as a design thinker, because it identifies how I feel and how I think. And I could also say that I am a creative problem solver. 

Given the fact that TBS has an entrepreneurial culture, I was already having an entrepreneurial mindset to create businesses instead of applying for a job. Meanwhile, I was focused on learning more because the more, you know; the more you know that you don’t know. After a decent experience, I realized that I needed to do more like co-founding an idea that I had with my partner and bringing it to reality. 

So Point Motion is a company co-founded by Kevin Clark and me. The idea came about when a family member has suffered a spinal cord injury after a motorcycle accident. When US people go for physical therapy, the doctor gives them a list of physical activities that they have to do at home to get better. The problem is that often those people get very intimidated by the exercises and they don’t show any motivation to do them. And that creates a lack of adherence in therapy and worsens the cases. 

It’s a vision from Kevin Clark, a Berkeley college of music alumnus that popped up. His background is in jazz composition and film scoring. The idea was how can we use music to be able to motivate people, to adhere to their physical therapy and be able to notify their doctors of their current state. The solution is about translating body movement into music. So when somebody moves a specific breed of their body, they make the sound.

So, we created a cause and effect relationship between movement and music. This helped people feel more engaged to do those activities prescribed. And at the same time we combined motion capture technology using computer vision to be able to track in real-time those movements and translate them to data.

So, one thing that I learned is that it’s not about bringing the product to the customer. Instead, it has more to do with satisfying the customers’ needs with the right product. 

What I’d love to tell TBS students and the new generation is to cherish this period of time to make sure that they use every moment to learn and to get internships, part-time jobs, etc. and it’s ok to learn and fail without fearing the judgements.

If you want to know more about Imen Maaroufi’s success story, please listen to her podcast for more !

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