Vincent Vu, Kinis AI: From Barefoot Running To High Tech Balance Checks
By Will Melton · September 28, 2026 · 30:06 read
Category: Health & Wellness
Show: Americas Healthiest City
Fall prevention has a new tool: a smartphone camera. Vincent Vu, founder of Kinis AI, demos the balance test built to catch instability weeks before it becomes a fall. Falling gets treated like an ine
Fall prevention has a new tool: a smartphone camera. Vincent Vu, founder of Kinis AI, demos the balance test built to catch instability weeks before it becomes a fall.
Falling gets treated like an inevitable part of aging, but the CDC numbers Vu found tell a different story. Falls are the leading cause of injury death for adults over 65, cost the U.S. $80 billion a year, and result in a hip fracture for 95% of people who experience one after 65. Vu founded Kinis AI to move fall prevention from reactive to predictive, flagging instability six to eight weeks out.
Vu didn't start in healthcare. He immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1998 after six years in a refugee camp, settled in Richmond in 1999, and spent two decades building a career as an architect. A health scare in his early 30s pushed him to start running. An injury two weeks in sent him down a research hole into foot biomechanics, and a book called Born to Run introduced him to the idea that the modern running shoe might work against the body's natural design. That research turned into a shoe company built on letting the foot move the way it evolved to. Two of its three designs earned American Podiatric Medical Association approval, and Vu ran a barefoot marathon in Austin to prove the point, raising money for Afghan refugees along the way.
The pivot to Kinis AI came from customers, not a plan. Shoe buyers over 50 kept asking if any product could help with balance, which sent Vu back to the CDC data and toward a question the fall-detection industry hadn't asked: what if the goal wasn't detecting a fall after it happens, but predicting it first? He recruited fall-prevention researcher Dr. Steven Morrison, partnered with VCU's biomedical engineering program, and used a $75,000 VIPs grant plus NIH funding to build a sensor-packed smart insole. It worked in the lab, but it would have cost roughly $2,000 a pair, which meant it couldn't reach the people who needed it most. So the team rebuilt the approach around a tool almost everyone already owns: a smartphone camera.
The result is a five-minute computer-vision balance test that fits inside a normal clinical visit and scores a patient across five components, including ankle stability, pelvic control, and trunk stability. Vu demos it live in the studio and walks through what a real score of 70 out of 100 means, along with the physician-designed exercises the platform assigns for the clinic or home. After a six-month clinical pilot with partner MD in the U.S. and clinics in Asia, Kinis AI is building toward the next layer: telehealth access to physical therapists through the same app.
It's also a Richmond story: Vu talks about the city's growing Vietnamese and Asian communities, his go-to bowl of pho at Mekong, and the murals that make Richmond feel like home, the same murals Channel RVA catalogs on RVA Art.
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https://kinis.ai/
Download the app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kinis-ai-balance-analysis/id6756301386
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