It started with a fall.
In 2010 an eighteen-year-old paraglider pilot named Spencer Stein fell out of the sky and fractured his back in four places. What he found on the other side of that accident, and inside the physical therapy system that was meant to help him, became Spiral Health.
A patient first.
The crash led to an MRI, and the MRI revealed something the crash had not caused: a congenital malformation wrapped around his spinal cord, found only because he fell. In the year that followed he underwent roughly eight hours of spinal-cord surgery, then months of slow recovery, relearning to walk two weeks at a time.
Then came the part that became a company. Inside the physical therapy system he found care that was fragmented and generic: appointments that were hard to get, insurance that stopped after a fixed number of sessions, no objective way to see whether he was improving, and home exercises with no way to know whether he was doing them right. Every other field of medicine had numbers. This one had adjectives.
He got better through an integrated, posture-first approach to movement, and resolved to make that kind of care measurable, personal and reachable by anyone. He told the story himself, in his own words, in a first-person essay for the San Diego Union-Tribune in August 2012: “A fall. A discovery. A gift.”
Two weeks after surgery, relearning to walk. Photograph published with the 2012 San Diego Union-Tribune essay.
From a clinical practice to any phone.
Spiral Health did not begin as an app. It began as a clinical posture-therapy practice, and every era since has been the same methodology solving the constraint the previous era exposed. Two of those eras are recorded in our archive without firm dates; we have left them undated rather than guess.
-
Phase 0 · the foundation
A clinical practice, and a written method
Spencer's clinical posture-therapy practice is the seed of the company, with his father Lee Stein as Chairman. The approach is codified as Integrated Posture Therapy (IPT) and written down in two foundational volumes, one on posture and one on metabolic health, so that a postural assessment can drive a personalized exercise prescription rather than a therapist's memory.
-
The Cage Scanner era
First, they built a cage
The original product was physical, not mobile: a cage-like structure of 20 lidar cameras that captured a full 3D reconstruction of the person standing inside it. Spiral's algorithm read the reconstruction against ideal joint alignment across three planes, identified postural deviations, and prescribed a personalized program: the clinical eye, mechanized. The system was protected by two foundational US patents covering distributed 3D body scanning, postural and balance analysis, and automatically generated therapeutic programs.
The cage proved the thesis: digital postural assessment works. It also exposed the constraint that shaped everything after it: physical scanning infrastructure does not scale.
The cage: a booth of lidar sensors with a guidance screen. Step in, hold a pose, get a full 3D reconstruction. 
What it measured: postural deviation made quantifiable. -
2018–2019
Taking it on the road: rural Wyoming
Spiral's mobile scanning unit travelled to the Wyoming Health Fairs in Gillette (2018) and Buffalo (2019), bringing 3D postural screening to rural communities that rarely get it. These were the company's first rural deployments and the beginning of the longest-running thread in its history: the work that became the Rural Health Initiative.
Gillette, August 2018. Attendees lined up for free 3D scans. 
A Wyoming Health Fairs team member walks a rancher through his results. -
The Spiral360 era
The scanner becomes a phone
Spiral360 translated the cage methodology onto a smartphone: two static photos, front and side, produced a body model the assessment algorithms could read, with a mobile exercise program on top. Pilot testing put the phone against the cage and confirmed that smartphone-based assessment was viable.
Viable, and still not enough. Static images miss what matters most. To see what is really going on, you have to watch the body move.
-
Q4 2022
The Neural Code era
Spiral licenses the Neural Code from Dr. Sheila Nirenberg (Cornell; MacArthur Fellow), a retina-inspired system that encodes motion into every frame, and begins a technology collaboration with Intel, formally kicked off at Intel's Chandler, Arizona campus in December 2022. The assessment moves from static photographs to movement: the architectural ancestor of today's eight-pattern movement classification.
-
2022
The methodology's evidence
The movement methodology is studied in academic protocols, including the SPINE CARE randomized clinical trial (JAMA, 2022; n = 2,971 across 33 centers, enrolled 2017–2020), whose individualized postural therapy arm was delivered in person, before the app existed. That evidence belongs to the methodology and the clinicians who delivered it. We keep the distinction deliberately, and it is why our own product studies are described as in progress rather than as results.
-
2024–2025
A commercial product ships
The app launches on the Apple App Store in 2024 and expands to Android in 2025: camera-only movement assessment, personalized daily programs, and voice-guided sessions on a phone people already own. The assessment consolidates into a single combined flow: four posture photos and six guided movements, across both platforms.
-
Q4 2025
Spiral becomes Flexa
The product is rebranded Flexa; the App Store listing renames and flexa.health goes live in December 2025. The company remains Spiral Health, the legal entity remains Spiral Physical Therapy, Inc., and the lockup is Flexa by Spiral Health. A useful rule of thumb for anyone reading our archive: material still labeled “Spiral Health” as the product name is the pre-2026 era.
-
2026
Medicare, and the evidence program
Spiral Health is approved as a participant in the CMS ACCESS Model, and a care-team platform ships alongside it for practitioners: rosters, audit logs and consent-gated patient workspaces. Health-system pilots begin generating the product's own outcome data: the evidence program that will let us eventually speak about the product the way we can already speak about the methodology.
The next chapter is partnerships.
Hospitals, health systems, employers and rural health programs. If movement care belongs in your population, we should talk.