Enhance VR Brain Training

Cognitive disorders have a huge impact on our quality of life and the global economy, and many of which can be detected very early. Cognitive assessment solutions are however limited lacking because screen-based formats fail to engage and track our body. Virtual reality is the answer because it's the first digital solution to trigger the autonomic nervous system into believing the experience is real. Which is why we've created a library of VR games designed as translations of neuropsychological assessment tools to test and train a range of cognitive functions like memory, information processing, and problem solving, as well as motor control and spatial orientation.

Alzheimer's disease alone costs $1 trillion around the globe. 419 million suffer from one form of cognitive impairment, whether it be ADHD, TBI, autism, and a form of dementia, or contingent on illnesses and treatments like MS, Parkinson's, chemotherapy ("chemo brain") or increasingly, even covid. We estimate that about 76 million people of these sufferers have the means and willingness to use new innovative solutions like our VR brain training games in order to be able to access the bleeding edge of cognitive assessment technology.

We have created Enhance VR, a library of VR games designed by our neuroscientists as translations of standardized neuropsychological assessment tools like the Stroop Test and the N-Back Task into 3D rendered environments that test and train a range of cognitive abilities, not only just including our memory, task switching, problem solving, and information processing skills, but also our motor skills, spatial orientation, and spatial audio awareness, and we make all that data accessible through our enterprise platform. The amount of data that we collect is unprecedented. Just 3-minutes of playing our games generates over 200,000 data points, and one full session, over a million, which means that we are collecting an order of magnitude more data about the human condition than any other digital solution. The volumetric data is a combination of granular player interaction with rich full body sensory data that is impossible to capture with screen-based formats that exclude the body. We are collecting body positioning, postures, and hand analysis so that we can detect subtle movements, like tremors and hands shaking.

Within the next decade, VR brain training will become normalized as part of a healthy routine and regime, just like going for a run and eating a healthy diet. Our technology will help extend the quality of life of the elderly, help children with learning challenges, and empower employees and the general population to perform at their peak cognitive levels, particularly by better understanding and being able to train their weakest abilities in order to become more wholesome as enabled individuals.

One of our games, for example, is based on the University of Cambridge's Dr. Barbara Sahakian's research on a game mechanism that tests and trains episodic memory, a type of long term memory. They found that by playing this game, neural activity was increased in the region of the brain associated with schizophrenia, and that with regular use, the symptoms of the condition actually abated.

VR brain training is like the gym for the mind, and stands to promote mental health in the same way as physical exercise relates to physical health. 

Our solution is available on all major VR app stores, with over 15,000 early users, and have won our first pilot with the biggest senior living community in Portugal (Santa Casa). We are now gearing to accelerate commercialization. Our first 24-month clinical study is also beginning recruitment in Barcelona with our partners, Vall d'Hebron.

Virtual reality triggers the autonomic nervous system, vestibular balance system, and our proprioception into believing that an experience is real. Cognitive is inherently embodied!

There have been, to-date, over 5,000 studies indicating the healthcare and educational powers of VR, and we are specialized in demonstrating that capacity for the purposes of taking cognitive assessment and training to the next level.

15,000 currently, with an aim of hitting 150,000 by 2022, and 5,000,000 in 5-years.

Primarily in building up our library into an exhaustive battery, as well as beginning and completing our first wave of phase 1 trials.

10 full-time.

My cofounder and CTO, Hossein, and I have been working together for over 9 years. He’s exited one fitness and wellness app, and I’m a leading expert in the field, having covered the evolution of VR for blogs like VentureBeat for the past 5 years.  We’ve also recently brought on board our Chief Science Officer with a background in Alzheimer’s research and biomarkers. Our team is a mix of scientists and game developers that believe that the intersection of emerging tech with social impact can help us tackle the biggest social challenges facing us today.

The more diversified the team is, the more rich the neurodiversity of talents available. We're often limited in who we can hire due to the nature of being a partially bootstrapped startup, but we prioritize looking for people of different backgrounds and experiences, as we believe neurodiversity promotes our resilience in the ecosystem.

We are working at an intersection of an emerging technology, which alone faces great challenges in and of itself in winning mainstream adoption and acceptance, and the neurosciences for the purpose of introducing life-changing applications for individuals that are inflicted by formidable cognitive disorders that fatefully beset themselves on us at whim, with basically no recourse other than managing the symptoms (e.g. Alzheimer's disease). The recognition that we could potentially get by being selected as a recipient of the grant would be invaluable in supporting our work and our vision, which will invariably help us to get more meetings with potential research and academic partners, as well as commercialize opportunities.

Data privacy and protection protocol is of utmost importance to our company, and it is a practice that is never finished. We need help with understanding the best practices, how to continuously ensure that we are on top of the necessary measures required to keep user data protected, and to understand the parallel roadmaps relating to FDA approvals.

MIT faculty would be of great help in mentoring our research and clinical roadmap, especially in relation to the AI-learning tools that we are looking to apply to our volumetric datasets in order to create predictive analytics (digital phenotype) that can potentially detect the early onset of cognitive illnesses many years before they onset simply by playing our VR cognitive games regularly.