From PT Clinic to Wearable: Cooper Boydston (Alenthia Run)

What if the gait analysis that normally takes a lab full of motion-capture cameras could ride along on every run? That's the bet behind Alenthia Run. Cooper Boydston, the company's CTO, joins DeAndre and Grant to talk about turning lab-grade running science into a small wearable that sits on your sacrum, reads your biomechanics, and flags the form problems that lead to injury.
It's two conversations in one: how the technology actually works, and the very real hardware-founder journey of getting a device like this out of the lab and onto real runners.
What we get into:

How running-form analysis used to work: locked in a lab, on a treadmill, covered in motion-capture markers, reviewed by an expert, and usually only after something already hurt
How Alenthia makes it continuous and portable: data on every run, not just one visit
The tech under the hood: pairing a well-placed accelerometer with lab-grade motion capture as the "true source," then using machine learning to turn noisy signal into a visual "fingerprint" of your gait
DeAndre's flag-football hamstring story, and why small changes in form prevent injuries
The hardware journey: shrinking a whole physical-therapy clinic into one device, and why "the first rule of hardware is to try not to do it"
Why UX and industrial design have to come in early (the classic "where's the power button?" moment), instead of getting bolted on at the end
The "lily pad" path of prototyping: lab accelerometers wired to a laptop, to a dev kit in a 3D-printed box, to a real wearable
Being your own first customer, and the pivot from selling to clinics toward the consumer market
The surprising core early adopter: people who would have visited a clinic but live where none exists, and why they happily forgive rough early hardware
Product-market fit and Mike Seibel's "hair on fire" test
The vision for V2 and V3: on-device compute vs the phone's "walled garden," and the resurgence of standalone, bespoke hardware
Building the team as "three guys in a garage" while still running the lab, plus closing advice for hardware builders (the 90/10 rule, and the mountain you would never climb if you saw the top)

A few lines that stuck with us:

"A frog never jumps all the way across the pond. He goes lily pad to lily pad."

"It takes 10% of your time and budget to get 90% of the way there, and 90% to get the last 10%."

"You were three steps away about 300 steps ago."

About the guest: Cooper Boydston is the CTO of Alenthia Run, which builds a wearable sensor that brings lab-grade running biomechanics out of the clinic and onto every run. The company grew out of a physical-therapy practice.
The Hardtech Podcast is hosted by DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman of Glassboard.