Robot for automated physiotherapy treatment delivery

The company, a growth-stage HealthTech startup headquartered in Spain, needed to solve this challenge: “a robot for delivering automated physiotherapy treatments.” The challenge combined disciplines rarely found in a single team: robotic arm control, infrared vision, PLC programming, and, on top of that, an interface designed for non-technical staff —the physiotherapists themselves—, which made it very difficult to find profiles on the market with that exact combination of experience. The client had its own CTO who would act as technical lead, but needed product and process leadership to carry such a multidisciplinary development through to launch with its first client, a private healthcare group, within a tight timeline of under 6 months.

Squad Challenge designed challenges for 4 critical profiles on the project —automation and PLC, infrared vision, backend for robotic arm control, and frontend/UX for non-technical staff—, evaluating an average of 5 candidates per position (20 evaluated in total) against the business case itself, in a range of between 5 and 10 days depending on the profile.

Squad Hiring managed, within 24h, the AOR-based hiring of the 6 developers validated through Squad Challenge, spread across Spain, Colombia, and Venezuela, handling contract generation adapted to each country of origin, data validation, and the onboarding process.

The Enabling Team started with a Product Designer and a robotics specialist who, together with a Scrum Master, led the project and the team —the remote squad and coordination with the client's CTO, who acted as technical lead— through to launching the product with its first client, a private healthcare group. The methodology applied was, as always, an adaptation of Agile to the client's type of organization, focused on coordinating hardware and software deliveries on a single cadence.

The squad brought on 6 developers (PLC/automation engineer x2, computer vision engineer, backend developer, frontend/UX developer x2) working on a stack of PLC (Siemens S7), ROS, Python (OpenCV), React, Python (FastAPI), PostgreSQL, GitHub, and AWS, proposed by Squadmakers —they become part of the client's team, not Squadmakers'—. The client already had its own CTO, who acted as technical lead, integrating the squad and the Enabling Team into its way of working. The product launched with its first client, a private healthcare group, in under 6 months from project kickoff.