dementia solution to aging society

Aging and dementia are global problem today. According to WHO, over 50 million people suffer from dementia and 10 million people are diagnosed each year. There's no cure and prevention by keeping brain active and early intervention remain best solutions. Music is known to enhance connectivity among various brain regions and scientifically proven that memory associated with music playing tends to be unscathed among severe dementia patients. Music isn't only good to elicit brain activities but also for personal wellness to keep positive mood. It's universal with no language barrier. Thus, I have developed Ipsilon Test, a tablet app which evaluates, monitors and trains cognitive functions with music playing design. It's currently validated at hospitals with dementia and Parkinson's disease. It can help routinely monitor risk groups and detect early signs of cognitive decline to enable early interventions. If used preventively, it helps to delay onset of possible dementia. 

Aging population with dementia risk and/or with early dementia face social isolation, stigma of dementia, difficulty for care access and high care costs. Dementia test often requires clinicians to administer a paper-based test and/or medical imaging such as MRI. They tend to be expensive, time-consuming and often intimidating.  Especially with pandemic, elderly populations have been impacted socially and clinically with limited access to care due to the virus exposure risk, hardship to shift to telemedicine due to the difficulty for the elderlies to use technology and socially being isolated. We believe that gamified app with scientifically validated design for brain function assessment solves the problem.  It not only provides routine cognitive care that the elderly needs to manage their quality of life but also help remove the stigma of dementia by utilizing music playing as the design of the app to encourage risk groups and early dementia patients to take proactive approach on one's brain health.  We also intend to integrate video call function to the app near future to enable socialization by offering specially-curated virtual concert for memory care, online playground for the elderly and also facilitate clinician's observation within our app to ensure the virtual doctor's visit. 

Our app is based on music playing, having simulated music notes as visuo-spatial-motor instructions and simulated piano grid is where users tap on the tablet screen to respond.  It collects time-stamped finger tapping response and its accuracy to generate parameters and our own scoring system is capable of assessing how well the user's brain functions.  The design is based on thalamo-cortico-basal ganglia circuit of the brain and its projected areas' brain functions.  The task we are eliciting is visuo-spatial-motor processing and what we measure are executive functions, processing speed and visuo-spatial skills. They are relevant to evaluate most of the cognitive issues of neurodegenerative diseases. Music is one of the most brain activating things you can do and it has great potential to be used clinically for cost-effective, easy-to-use, remotely operable care medium. Especially with the pandemic, risk mitigation by shifting to digital health and telehealth consultation have been important to continuously deliver much needed care while not exhausting the hospital resources to combat the pandemic. Solution like ours with gamification and music, we help tackle possible next health crisis by offering user-friendly app to continuously monitor brain functions to help maintain quality of life of the elderly. 

Our target population is neurodegenerative disease risk groups and patients, especially early to moderate dementia, Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis. With the pandemic, many of those patients have been compromised with their care that they have been receiving one way or the other.  We facilitate remotely operable, easy-and-fun-to use cognitive care solution to help maintain their brain management including monitoring, screening and cognitive training which are otherwise done onsite with clinicians and/or therapists at routine intervals. Our solution is gamified, which makes the patient compliance much better than other digital health solutions. 

Under the pandemic, the most impacted have been the vulnerable population such as the elderly who often have neurological issues which cause dementia. Even with the normal circumstances, dementia comes with stigma and hard to address the importance of managing the brain wellness. We believe that the solution which can offer remotely and easily operable brain care tool with gamified design to remove stigma are scarce. We hope to bridge the needs of elderly memory care and wellness with music. 

We are in the early dementia study with 50 patients at Baycrest in Toronto, Canada to validate our solution as remotely used tool and cognitive monitoring and training capability. We are also scheduled with Parkinson's disease validation study with 50 patients at Neuro SysMed Center at Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway from September. It is to test our solution's remote cognitive monitoring and assessment capabilities.  Once validated, we are also scheduled to supply our solution to the same hospital's STRATPARK observational study with 2000 patients. We have just submitted a NIH grant application for multiple sclerosis study with Cleveland Clinic with 320 patients, which is scheduled in 2022 pending the approval. 

Music is known to elicit brain activations in various regions and improves memory and other cognitive functions. Yet it has not been applied in clinical workflow other than wellness and music therapy.  Music playing is so easy to be integrated with game and consumer gadgets to be used as home care solution. With CEO's 20 years of observational data and know-how, we have put the music's potential over brain function monitoring and assessment into a web-based app.  So far, the feasibility study with Parkinson's patients provided very promising data for the brain functionality monitoring and screening accuracy and the ease of use to be fit into clinical workflow. It can fit into OFF mode detection and medication management for Parkinson's disease while being used for newly approved Alzheimer's disease medication to keep track of cognitive functionality of the users to ensure the medication's efficacy. Our solution has potential to change how we manage medications with more personalized, precision care. 

Currently serving 50 in the study.  In one year, we will have approximately 7350 users from the scheduled studies.

KPIs include user numbers, revenues and which markets we operate and serve.  We also hope to generate social impact of how we view dementia and how we deliver care for neurodegenerative diseases.  If our company can be associated with those changes, that's a great social traction.