Robot for automated physiotherapy treatment delivery

The company, a growth-stage HealthTechstartup headquartered in Spain, needed to solve this challenge: “a robot fordelivering automated physiotherapy treatments.” The challenge combineddisciplines rarely found in a single team: robotic arm control, infraredvision, PLC programming, and, on top of that, an interface designed fornon-technical staff —the physiotherapists themselves—, which made it verydifficult to find profiles on the market with that exact combination ofexperience. The client had its own CTO who would act as technical lead, butneeded product and process leadership to carry such a multidisciplinarydevelopment through to launch with its first client, a private healthcaregroup, within a tight timeline of under 6 months.

Squad Challenge designed challenges for4 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 dependingon the profile.

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

The Enabling Team started with a ProductDesigner and a robotics specialist who, together with a Scrum Master, led theproject 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 firstclient, a private healthcare group. The methodology applied was, as always, anadaptation of Agile to the client's type of organization, focused oncoordinating hardware and software deliveries on a single cadence.

The squad brought on 6 developers (PLC/automationengineer x2, computer vision engineer, backend developer, frontend/UX developerx2) working on a stack of PLC (Siemens S7), ROS, Python (OpenCV), React, Python(FastAPI), PostgreSQL, GitHub, and AWS, proposed by Squadmakers —they becomepart of the client's team, not Squadmakers'—. The client already had its ownCTO, who acted as technical lead, integrating the squad and the Enabling Teaminto its way of working. The product launched with its first client, a privatehealthcare group, in under 6 months from project kickoff.