About us

A company that started in somebody's living room and never really left.

We build recovery technology for the home, because home is where recovery actually happens. We did not learn that from a market study. We learned it the long way, one house at a time.

The story runs straight down this page

Eleven years old

Somebody had to be the one in the room

Michael Bankowski started caregiving at eleven, looking after his grandmother on his mother’s side. His mother was a nurse, so he was taught properly rather than left to guess at it, which is more than most people in that position get. It was a way to give something back to a woman who had given a great deal to him and his brother.

Most people who do this work arrive at it the same way. You are simply the person who is there when help is needed, and you work the rest out as you go.

Rosalynn Carter used to point out that there are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are caregivers now, those who will be, and those who will need one. That is not a category. That is everybody. It was true of a boy of eleven and it is true of whoever is reading this.

Then, for over a decade

A home care agency, and 10,000 hours of his own

He grew up to own and run a home care agency for more than ten years, with over 10,000 hours of hands-on caregiving on top of running it. That is a lot of time in other people's kitchens, bathrooms and back bedrooms.

You learn things there that do not appear in a discharge summary. You learn what a folded sheet of exercises is worth by the third week. You learn which families are about to come apart, and why, and how little it would have taken to prevent it.

What ten years in other people's houses teaches you

None of this is a technology problem first. It is a Tuesday afternoon problem.

The clinic is not where recovery is won. It is won at home, at two in the morning, with nobody watching and nobody keeping score.
Recovery carries on in rooms that contain no equipment and no clinician, and the research holds up: home-based stroke rehabilitation can match center-based programs for daily-living independence.
A person comes home after a stroke with a paper sheet of exercises and a phone number for questions.
And the person who has to make all of it work is usually unpaid, untrained, and never once asked how they are holding up.

On home-based rehabilitation matching center-based programs: systematic review and meta-analysis, Physical Therapy, 2025, PMID 40167208.

April 2021

US Patent 10,966,897 B2

An automated walker assembly, granted in April 2021. A machine meant to help a person get up and take a step in their own hallway, rather than in a gym with a rail on either side.

We named it ROSE, after Michael's mother. She was an Air Force nurse who then gave 33 years to the VA. She spent her whole working life helping people stand up again, so it seemed right that the first patent should carry her name.

The drawings

ROSE, as the patent office received her.

Patent drawing, figure 1: a four wheeled walker with a powered arm, a small control screen on the housing and a grip handle for the user. — Fig. 1, the assembly

Patent drawing, figure 3: the same walker seen from the side, showing the arm's range of movement and the internal housing. — Fig. 3, the arm in motion

The idea underneath it is old fashioned. If a person can stand, and then take one step, a great deal of the rest of their life becomes possible again.

Three continents

Four people arrived at the same conclusion without consulting each other

Michael in Sioux Falls, from the caregiving side of it. Maja Rudinac, building certified robots out of Delft and now working from Switzerland, from the research and engineering side. Zen Koh across Asia Pacific and Switzerland, from twenty years of putting rehabilitation robots into hospitals. Clay Pavlis, a physician and a veteran himself, watching what happens to people after the appointment ends and they go home.

None of them set out to agree with the others. They each worked out, separately, that the home is where the recovery is decided and that the home has almost nothing in it. Then they found each other. This company is what happened next.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

A time machine in the corridor.

Michael Bankowski and Maja Rudinac standing in a corridor at the MIT Newman Lab, in front of a glass display case holding a partly built, bare metal DeLorean and a Mr. Fusion canister. — Michael and Maja at the MIT Newman Lab, where a great deal of the original science of robotic gait training was done. Behind the glass is a student built DeLorean, Mr. Fusion and all. Michael asked for this photograph by name, on the grounds that Back to the Future is the best film ever made and that any lab keeping a time machine in the hallway is a lab worth working with.

Why we do it in this order

One person getting better is never just one person getting better.

Heal a veteran.
The family heals with them, because the family was carrying it too.
A steady family steadies the street it lives on.
And that community reaches the next veteran faster than we ever could from here.

When we serve the community, the community serves us. That is not charity running in one direction. It is simply how a place gets better, and it is the reason we start where we start.

June 2026

Certified, and available to download

Prosperous Healthcare LLC was certified SDVOSB by the SBA in 2026. That is the entity the certification sits in, and it is the one that carries federal contracting. Prosperous Robotics Group, Inc. is not SDVOSB certified, which is worth saying plainly because a contracting officer will check.

Heroes.AI went live on the App Store in June 2026. We say this plainly: that is a distribution milestone. It means the app can be downloaded. It is not a regulatory clearance and we will never describe it as one.

Today

What actually exists

Heroes.AI, which brings physical, occupational, speech and mental health therapy together in one adaptive platform for the home.
Heroes Exoskeleton, for walking and balance. In research and prototyping, market entry planned for 2027.
HandVivante, which holds an FDA 510(k) and is manufactured by Robotimize. Prosperous is the US distributor and the transfer is in process.
Heroes Care, for caregivers, in development.

Alongside

The work that sits around the work

We research with the Harvard Move Lab, the Wyss Institute, Harvard Medical, Spaulding, the MIT Newman Lab and Yale, and at home with USD, SDSU, DSU and SD Mines. Two federal entities carry the government side: Prosperous Robotics Group, Inc. and Prosperous Healthcare LLC.

We own the software stack outright. Hardware runs through a partnership and distribution agreement with Robotimize covering Singapore and Malaysia, which Zen works day to day from the region. FedRAMP 20x Low and SOC 2 are underway, which means underway and not finished. MotusAcademy Foundation is the nonprofit, and it does the part of this that was never going to pay for itself.

Sioux Falls

Some of it looks like robotics. Most of it looks like a parking lot.

Zen Koh standing in a snowy parking lot outside the Discovery District building at dusk, holding up two black hard sided device cases, each marked with a small United States flag. — Zen outside the building with two of the first devices to arrive, opened in the parking lot at dusk because neither of us wanted to wait until we were indoors.

Michael Bankowski jumping with both arms raised inside a long, unfinished concrete floor with exposed ceiling ducts and tall windows looking out onto open prairie. He is wearing a hip exoskeleton over his clothes. — The same building before the fit out, and a hip unit being tested on a bare floor. The view out of those windows is prairie, which is most of the view here.

Michael Bankowski, Zen Koh and the former mayor of Sioux Falls standing together in a meeting room, all three smiling at the camera. — Zen and Michael with the former mayor of Sioux Falls. Not every room that matters is in Washington.

The founders

Four people, and what each one is answerable for.

We did not set out together. Maja built a certified robotic walker in Europe. Michael invented and patented one in the United States. Zen spent twenty years scaling rehabilitation robotics across Asia. In 2025 we found each other and merged the work into a single company, which is a stranger and better story than any of us planned.

01

Michael Bankowski

Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Service-disabled Air Force veteran. Started caregiving at eleven, looking after his grandmother. Owned a home care agency for more than a decade and has over 10,000 hours of hands-on caregiving behind him, across more diagnoses than he can list.

He drew ROSE because his mother needed one, and was granted US Patent 10,966,897 B2 in April 2021. Everything the company has built since came out of that drawing. He is also the reason there is federal report language on veteran mobility in two appropriations cycles.

“Caregivers are the invisible backbone of healthcare. They show up every day, often without a thank you, often without a break.”

Answerable for The company and everything it promises. The veterans work. Making sure nothing we say gets out ahead of what we can actually show you.
02

Dr. Maja Rudinac

Co-Founder, Research and Development.

Switzerland

PhD in AI and Robotics from TU Delft, and more than twenty years building robotics companies across Europe, the United States and Japan. Founder and CEO of Robot Care Systems, where she created LEA, a certified robotic walker that reached rehabilitation centres across Europe and the Middle East with full insurance reimbursement, ran more than a thousand patient trials, and reached over thirty centres worldwide.

In 2019 she was awarded the Prince Friso Engineering Prize, the Netherlands’ highest engineering honour, presented as Engineer of the Year. A Red Dot award. More than 50 peer-reviewed publications.

Heroes.AI is hers. She has led it from the first sketch, and the architecture, the direction, the research underneath it and the people building it are her work. She built the walker a decade ago and has been arguing ever since that the machine is only half the answer, and that the other half is software that learns the person using it. Heroes.AI is that second half, finally built.

Answerable for Research and development, and Heroes.AI. What the machines can genuinely do today, and, just as importantly, what they cannot do yet.
03

Zen Koh

Co-Founder, APAC and international operations.

Singapore and Switzerland

Twenty years in medical technology, and one of the most recognized figures in rehabilitation robotics anywhere. Co-Founder and Global CEO of Fourier Intelligence, which he helped build into a presence in 57 countries with seventeen joint research labs and more than $100 million raised, including from Saudi Aramco Prosperity7 Ventures and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Before that he led Hocoma in Asia-Pacific, building the rehabilitation robotics market across the region from the ground up.

He founded MotusAcademy in Switzerland, the non-profit society that now convenes clinicians, engineers and researchers worldwide, and he is Managing Editor of its peer-reviewed Journal of Rehabilitation Methods and Technologies, published with Emerald. He is President of IISART, chaired RehabWeek 2023, and was named to MD+DI’s 40 Under 40 as a future leader of medtech. Former research fellow at the National University of Singapore.

“Rehabilitation robotics is not about the device with the prettiest gait. It is about building the clinical permission stack to treat at scale.”

Answerable for Asia Pacific and international operations. The company everywhere outside the United States, and the partners who build and move what we ship.
04

Dr. Clay Pavlis, MD

Co-Founder, Chief Medical Director.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Board-certified psychiatrist, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, with more than fifteen years treating complex psychiatric illness across the lifespan. MD from the University of South Dakota School of Medicine. Founder of MWI Health, a multi-state mental health practice specialising in veteran services, psychiatric evaluation, medication management, neuromodulation and addiction medicine, with deep experience in rural and underserved communities across South Dakota and Minnesota, including extensive VA evaluation work.

A veteran himself, and the reason veterans’ mental health and quality of life sit at the front of every clinical conversation we have.

Answerable for Clinical direction. What we will claim, what we will not claim, and whether any of this makes a real difference to the person living inside it.
05

Spencer Wolf

Director of Government Affairs. Fifteen years in legislative relations and policy advocacy, previously Vice President at The Daschle Group, and President of Wolf Strategies. Master of Policy Management, Georgetown.

Washington, DC

Answerable for The federal work. Getting language written, getting it kept, and turning congressional direction into something a department will actually act on.