Al-mashy Sign in

Clinical gait analysis · from a phone

Every step. Every person. Everywhere.

Al-mashy turns the smartphone already in your pocket into a lower-back gait sensor. Strap it on, walk, and receive the spatio-temporal gait parameters that laboratories measure, without the laboratory.

Work with us
100 HzAccelerometer + gyroscope
L2–L3Sensor at the lower back
0 EURNo extra hardware
Man walking along a clinic corridor, seen from behind, with a smartphone secured flat against his lower back in an elastic belt; the phone screen shows the Al-mashy recording trace L2 to L3phone in a belt, screen facing out
Where the phone goes

Sensor placement

One phone, on the lower back, and walk

The phone sits in an elastic belt over the lower lumbar spine, at the level of L2 to L3, close to the body's centre of mass. From there its accelerometer feels every heel strike and toe-off of both legs, and its gyroscope tells left from right. The person simply walks: a corridor, a car park, a garden path.

  • BeltAny snug running or medical belt. The phone must not bounce; the exact angle does not matter, the app corrects for tilt.
  • WalkTwenty metres or more at the person's usual pace. Turns are detected and left out of the numbers.
  • Screen offRecording continues in the background, so the phone can be pocketed in the belt with the screen dark.

What it is

A gait lab in three steps

Al-mashy is a platform: a phone app that records, a server that analyses, and a web application where a clinic manages its physiotherapists, clients and sessions. Every raw recording is kept, so results can be re-analysed as the science improves.

STEP 1 · RECORD

Phone on the lower back, tap START

An elastic belt holds the phone over L2 to L3. The app records the accelerometer and gyroscope at 100 Hz, shows the live trace, and names the file by date and time. Recording continues with the screen off.

STEP 2 · UPLOAD

One tap sends the walk to the clinic server

The recording is stored under the client and the physiotherapist who made it. Sign-in is with a Google account, by invitation only, so nobody outside the clinic can see its data.

STEP 3 · READ

Parameters, quality rating and plot in seconds

Cadence, step and stride time, stance, swing, double support, step length, speed, asymmetry and variability, with a plain quality rating that says whether the walk was long and steady enough to trust.

Look & feel

The phone app

Sharp, angular and quiet. Green for the clinic, gold for the one thing that matters on each screen. No Arabic lettering, but a mark that belongs in the Gulf: the eight-point star.

Sign in

Invitation-only Google sign-in. The phone is linked to the physiotherapist's account automatically.

Clients

Many clients per physiotherapist, many recordings per client, named by date and time.

Session

Results come back to the phone after upload and are the same ones the web application shows.

Look & feel

The web application

Three roles. The platform owner creates clinics and sees only counts. A clinic admin invites physiotherapists and exports everything. A physiotherapist sees their own clients and every session in full.

Session page

Initial contacts in gold, final contacts in red, on the filtered vertical acceleration. Every number can be traced back to the raw file.

Collaborate

We are looking for people

Al-mashy is at the stage where it needs to be tested by many hands, on many kinds of walking, against reference systems. We want to do that in the open, with partners who publish.

MASTER'S STUDENTS

A ready-made dissertation

Validation studies against instrumented walkways or motion capture, reliability across phones and belts, or clinical case series. We provide the platform, the data pipeline and supervision on the engineering side; your university provides the academic supervision and ethics.

CLINICIANS

Pilot it in your practice

Physiotherapists, rehabilitation teams and sports clinics who want objective gait numbers in the room, not in a lab report weeks later. A clinic gets its own space on the platform, with its own admin and its own data.

RESEARCHERS

Improve the algorithms

Gait scientists, biomedical engineers and data scientists: turn detection, pathological gait, fall-risk features, machine-learning classifiers on top of the parameters. The analysis code is versioned and every result records the algorithm that produced it.

INSTITUTIONS

Bring it to your region

Universities, hospitals and health authorities in the GCC and beyond who want a low-cost, scalable way to measure walking in older adults and people with neurological conditions.

Get in touch · access is by invitation during the beta

Tell us about you, your institution and your aim

Al-mashy is in a closed beta. Access to the platform and the app is by invitation, and this form is how invitations start. Karthikeyan reads every message and replies through whichever contact detail you choose to share.

Would you like initial hands-on with this technology?
How should we reply? (optional, share whichever you are happy with)

Get the app

Install Al-mashy on Android

Al-mashy is in its pilot phase and is not yet on the Google Play Store, so it is sent to you by email with instructions on how to install it. Android 8.0 or newer with an accelerometer and gyroscope; almost every phone made since 2017 qualifies. During the beta, access is by invitation only: the app installs on any phone, but signing in, uploading and results need an invitation from Al-mashy or a participating clinic. Ask for one with the form above.

Current version

Al-mashy 0.8.1

Android package (APK) · 7.8 MB · signed beta build, 30 September 2026 · adds the Balance module

Beta · invitation only. Install freely; sign-in needs an invited Google account.

The app is emailed to you; open the email on the phone itself. iPhone is not supported yet.

  1. DownloadOn the phone, open our email and tap the attached Al-mashy file. Chrome may warn that this type of file can harm your device; tap Download anyway. This warning appears for every app that is not from the Play Store.
  2. Open the filePull down the notification shade and tap the finished download, or open Files and look in Downloads for Al-mashy-0.8.1.apk.
  3. Allow the installAndroid will say "For your security, your phone is not allowed to install unknown apps from this source". Tap Settings, switch on Allow from this source, then go back. Tap Install. If Play Protect asks, choose Install anyway; the app is signed by Physiodemy UK Ltd and contains only the recorder.
  4. Open Al-mashyAllow notifications when asked. They are what keeps the recording running when the screen is off. If your phone offers battery optimisation choices for the app, choose Unrestricted so the sensor stream is never throttled.
  5. Sign inThe clinic server is already set to gait.physiodemy.com. Tap Continue with Google. Use the Google account your clinic invited. Tap Open Al-mashy on the confirmation page and you are connected. No clinic yet? Tap Use offline: you can still record and share the raw files.
  6. Record a walkAdd a client, strap the phone at the lower back with the screen facing out, tap Start, walk twenty metres or more, tap Stop. Open the recording and tap Upload; the gait parameters appear on the phone and on the web in a few seconds.

Updating: install the new version over the old one; clients and recordings are kept. Removing: uninstall like any app; recordings already uploaded stay on the clinic server. Something not working? Use the form above and tell us the phone model and Android version.

Karthikeyan Muthumayandi

The idea behind Al-mashy

"Gait laboratories measured movement for the privileged few. Al-mashy takes that measurement out into the real world, at low cost, to anyone with a phone and a connection. That has always been my goal. AI now makes it possible."

Karthikeyan MuthumayandiClinical and scientific adviser to Al-mashy · Programme Director in Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy, University of Birmingham Dubai

Karthikeyan is a physiotherapist and academic with more than twenty-five years in clinical practice, research and teaching across the NHS, private practice and universities in the UK and the Gulf. He is Assistant Professor in Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy and a programme director at the University of Birmingham Dubai, in the School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences, where he supervises master's students in sports and exercise medicine. Before Dubai he spent nine years at the University of Kent as a lecturer and Programme Director of Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation, and ten years as a research physiotherapist with Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. He has long been passionate about digital technologies and about bringing them to the masses, in education and in everyday clinical care.

Al-mashy, from the Arabic for "the walker", is his answer to a simple problem: gait laboratories are rare and expensive, while phones with excellent inertial sensors are in everyone's pocket. He advises, collaborates and provides the ideas behind Al-mashy in a personal capacity, working with the Physiodemy Tech team, who designed and built the platform. Profile on LinkedIn.

Developed by Physiodemy UK Ltd