25-07-2025
Sitting up and taking notice: Kerry's former head of physio aims to bring ‘elite' thinking with Habitus Health
It's more than a decade since Ed Harnett worked as Kerry's head of physio as the Kingdom claimed the All-Ireland, under Éamonn Fitzmaurice, beating Donegal in the 2014 final.
These days, Mr Harnett is the chief executive of Habitus Health in Cork, a healthcare tech company specialising in ergonomic and workplace risk assessment.
Habitus now has 6,000 users on its platform from 15 companies, and this month is closing on adding a further 12,000 users from more than 200 separate manufacturing sites — something which would be 'game-changing' for the company, says Mr Harnett.
The clients might have changed from dealing with Kerry footballers, but the knowledge acquired working with Éamonn Fitzmaurice now drives the Ballincollig-headquartered company.
'My club was Finuge in North Kerry. I played with Paul Galvin and Éamonn Fitzmaurice back in the day. I was an average wing back,' he says. 'I was gone when they started winning stuff!
I was head physio to the Kerry senior football team during Éamonn's time as manager and he brought an awful lot of that new thinking into that Kerry set-up, where data was so important.
'We looked at the whole medical support for the team. I set up a network of orthopedic surgeons both in Santry and locally. If there was an injury on a Sunday, we had the scan done and dusted by Monday."
Mr Harnett worked in the Kerry set-up from 2012 until 2016. In 2016, he co-founded Habitus Health with Breffni Allen from Cork, who had a background in computer science.
Habitus is a tech company at its heart, and its original focus was a sensor for workplace ergonomics and healthcare.
"We developed a wearable and built an app and an algorithm that would detect spinal movement. So if you slouched, say beyond 20 degrees, you'd get a haptic sensation — a buzz in your chest to remind you to move. We piloted in Cork County Council with around 70 people and we were getting 2,000 'reminders' a day."
Kevin Tattan, Habitus, head of product, and chief executive Ed Harnett.
Enterprise Ireland was an early backer, while the European Space Agency invested as Haptus researched preventing muscle injury in zero gravity.
Then Covid hit. "We had our first funding raise when it struck. The bottom fell out of the supply chain. The price of chips went from 40c to €5 or €6 and there were a number of chips on every sensor board. It wasn't doable."
The company switched direction to analysing movements. "That's when we got seriously into the computer vision technology in the workplace. We developed the idea of the workplace athlete.
All this money is thrown on players to perform for 60 minutes a week, but here we have millions of people sitting for eight hours minimum a day. We should treat each of them as an elite athlete.
Computer vision technology and AI are now key elements of the Habitus Health offering. Using a tailored, data-driven approach, assessments are often out incorporating video assessment. The most pressing cases in a company can be triaged all at once.
Employee workplace health can be monitored for as little as €2 a month, and the company has moved beyond office workplaces into sectors like manufacturing floors and aviation.
From its headquarters in Ballincollig, Habitus continues to expand, currently raising a further €1.3m in investment. It employs eight people in Cork — including former Cork City head of S&C, and former Wexford camogie manager Kevin Tattan as head of product — along with eight others worldwide.
The company is rolling out its workplace health and safety platform across Enterprise Ireland's 900 Irish-based and global staff. Contracts in construction and tech operations in the UK, and others further afield, are imminent.
All based on simple but economically sound ideas. "Healthy workers drive high-performing companies," says Mr Harnett. "When you apply the science to the employee, it's mind boggling how it's not being done. Your number one asset is the person — if someone doesn't turn up for work, there's going to be a pinch on your bottom line."
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