Canadian Medtech Innovator Seeks Strategic Partnerships—and a New Kind of ‘Karma’ in Taiwan

Karma cofounders Darryl and Melissa Short

There’s a certain irony in the name. Karma Medical Products. In Taiwan, it means world-class mobility. In Canada, it’s a machinist who reinvented rehab tech.

Meet Darryl Short: The Edmonton entrepreneur who built the FEPSim®—a “missing link” device that’s changing stroke and injury recovery.

Co-Founder of Karma Machining and Manufacturing and Karma Medical Products Ltd., Darryl Short, is in Taiwan with a clear mission: to find smart, values-aligned partners who want to help them build the next generation of IoT-enabled future of upper-extremity rehab—and to change the way the world thinks about upper-extremity recovery.

Built Different: From Machining Steel to Rebuilding Lives

Karma’s story doesn’t start in a boardroom. It starts in a machine shop—one built by people who make products, not PowerPoints.

Short is a certified machinist and mechanical technologist who spent his career turning ideas into physical products. His wife and co-founder, Melissa, is an occupational therapy assistant who knows what rehab success looks like from the front lines.

Together, they did something unusual: they turned their shop’s precision manufacturing know-how into med-tech innovation.

The result was FEPSim®—the Flexion-Extension-Pronation-Supination Simulator—a deceptively simple rehabilitation tool that’s now helping patients regain movement after stroke, spinal cord injury, or orthopedic trauma. “We’re exploring aging-in-place use cases, where older adults or individuals with spinal cord injuries may not be able to access traditional gym settings,” said Short. “Our goal is to bring the product out of the gym and into group environments to help people practice and maintain everyday functional movements.”

Read the full TechSoda interview: https://techsoda.substack.com/p/canadian-medtech-innovator-seeks