When Mohan, a 69-year-old retired engineer from Ernakulam, woke up after spine surgery, even the smallest movements felt out of reach. He could not move either leg. Both limbs had lost their strength, and bending his knees on his own was impossible. For weeks, getting from one place to another meant depending entirely on a wheelchair and the hands of the people around him. 

Then, one day during his rehabilitation programme, a machine was brought into the ward. It strapped around his lower body, read his movement, and did something no exercise or physiotherapy session had managed on its own: it made his legs move.

"It triggers the walking motion," Mohan recalls. "It activates something I was not able to do on my own. Slowly, slowly, I was able to move my legs in that position."

The machine that helped Mohan take his first steps was built not in Germany or the United States. It came from Kochi — built by a startup called Astrek Innovations. 

And the story of how it came to exist begins not in a laboratory, but in a family home in northern Kerala, where a young man watched his grandfather — a strong, active man he deeply admired — lose the ability to walk after a surgery that should have gone well.

A surgery that left a nagging question

Robin Kanattu Thomas (30), the founder of Astrek Innovations, grew up in Kannur. His grandfather had been in an accident, undergone surgery, and was, by every clinical measure, healthy enough to walk afterwards. But without access to proper, sustained rehabilitation, he never did.

"He was completely clinically healthy to walk, but he couldn't because of a lack of proper rehabilitation," Robin says.

That gap — between what was medically possible and what actually happened — lodged itself in Robin's mind.

Robin already understood the world of assistive devices through his NGO work with people with disabilities. He had visited hospitals, spoken to rehabilitation centres, and seen how much recovery depended on the right support at the right time.

But after what happened to his grandfather, those visits began to feel more personal. He started looking at rehabilitation wards with a different question in mind: how many people were losing the chance to walk again simply because the right technology was too expensive or too far away?

To understand this better, Robin, along with Co-Founders Alex M Sunny, Jithin Vidya Ajith and Vishnu Sankar began spending time inside rehabilitation facilities across Kerala. They spoke directly with stroke patients, people recovering from spinal cord injuries, and others living with lower-limb disabilities.

What they found was consistent: the solutions existed, but not here. They remained out of reach for most patients in India. 

Robotic exoskeletons for rehabilitation were already being used in countries such as Japan, Israel, Russia and the United States. In India, they were virtually absent, partly because importing them could cost upwards of Rs 1.5 crore to Rs 2 crore per unit and partly because servicing and maintenance support were difficult to sustain.

"You can't bring engineers for service from different countries every time something goes wrong," Robin says. "And........

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