A hip fracture isn’t just a broken bone.
It’s the end of living alone. The end of driving. For many older adults, it’s the event that separates the life they had from the one that follows.
But the standard test measures how much bone is there, not how strong it is, and the majority of fragility fractures happen in people it never flagged.
Those patients weren’t missed through carelessness. They were missed because the instrument couldn’t see them.
We built a different instrument.
It started with glue.
Dr. Paul Hansma spent his career at UC Santa Barbara building tools that could feel what cameras couldn’t — he was a pioneer of atomic force microscopy, the technology that let science touch individual molecules.
He turned that work toward bone and found something unexpected. Bone survives impact by breaking on purpose — molecular bonds in its organic matrix rupture first, absorbing the energy before it can reach anything structural, then re-form afterward. Hansma called them sacrificial bonds. The work was published in Nature.1
It came with an uncomfortable implication.
If you can’t image it, there’s one way left. You have to touch the bone and see how it answers.
Fourteen years from physics to exam room.
Hansma and co-founder Alexander Proctor invented a new measurement method and spent the next decade turning laboratory physics into something a clinician can hold in one hand.
OsteoProbe® delivers a single controlled impact and measures how the bone tissue resists it. Strong bone holds. Weak bone gives. The result is the Bone Material Strength Index (BMSi) — a direct, radiation-free readout of a property medicine has understood for decades and never been able to measure in a living person.
FDA granted clearance through the De Novo pathway, reserved for devices with no predicate. There was nothing to compare it to.2
Spun out of UC Santa Barbara in 2007. Cleared by FDA in 2021. Fourteen years — because inventing a measurement is the easy half. Proving it means something takes longer.
We didn’t write most of the research.
Researchers on five continents have published using our technology — across diabetes, kidney disease, transplant medicine, glucocorticoid therapy, HIV, and osteoporosis.
Most of that work was done by investigators with no relationship to this company, asking their own questions, in their own patients. A large, independent body of published research underpins the science behind BoneScore.
Bone strength should be as routine to check as blood pressure.
Measured at the annual physical. Tracked over time. Acted on early — while there’s still something to act on.
The device is handheld and uses no radiation, so there is no physical reason a rural clinic can’t offer the same measurement as an academic medical center. What stands between here and there is clinical evidence, reimbursement, and adoption. We’re working on all three.
We are an ISO 13485 certified, FDA-registered manufacturer. Every OsteoProbe is designed, built, and shipped from Santa Barbara by a small team who have spent years on a problem most people assumed was already solved.
It isn’t solved yet. But it’s finally measurable.
References
- Fantner GE, Hansma PK, et al. Sacrificial bonds and hidden length dissipate energy as mineralized fibrils separate during bone fracture. Nature Materials. 2005. View source →
- U.S. Food & Drug Administration. De Novo classification DEN210013; 510(k) K250216 (OsteoProbe). View source →