BIO BUSINESS54 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
BIO BUSINESSAnother group, venture capital–funded
Linus Health, is working with Au and other
neurocognitive experts to develop a brain
health monitoring platform that is indepen-
dent of any particular tech brand or company.
The platform will analyze several aspects of
a person’s behavior to glean insights into
their brain, and merge it with medical health
records, says David Bates, one of the com-
pany’s cofounders. Linus has already built
its monitoring tool: a smartphone app that
reminds users to do certain tasks and mea-
sures reaction time, voice and speech, gait,
and other potential biomarkers. One task
might be to assess changes in gait under a
cognitive load: a user walks normally with a
smartphone in her pocket; then, she is asked
to count backwards by threes from 300 while
still walking. Analysis of data generated by
the device’s built-in sensors can assess heel
strike, toe lift, balance, and walking speed,
and differences seen during counting could
reveal a declining mind.Researchers at Linus Health are also
developing an in-clinic assessment on a
tablet. For example, in one task a per-
son might be asked to describe what is
going on in a picture while their voice is
recorded and speech transcribed, “so it
can be analyzed for neuromuscular and
cognitive health,” says Bates. Other tasks
could involve subjects playing games
while the device tracks accuracy, response
times, and eye movements. “All these dif-
ferent things combined give a holistic
picture of what’s going on in someone’s
brain,” he says.
Another initiative called the
GameChanger project, led by digital
phenotyping researcher Chris Hinds at
the University of Oxford’s Big Data Insti-
tute in the UK, uses Mezurio, a phone app
that administers game-like tasks to mea-
sure executive function, paired-associa-
tion learning, and speech production, for
5 minutes per day for 30 days. Users alsoself-report mood, sleep, and any word-find-
ing difficulties or disorientation. In this first
phase of the project, anyone who hasn’t
been diagnosed with cognitive impair-
ment can download the app and take part.
After a year, they are invited to take part
in GameChanger again. Users’ responses
provide information for researchers about
brain function in people without dementia,
and how the brain changes over time,
according to the website of the UK-based
Alzheimer’s Society, which partially funds
the project. Since 2018, more than 16,500
people across the UK have used the app
and contributed data. Hinds and colleagues
note in a 2019 preprint about the app that
they plan to study people with diagnosed
cognitive decline, too.Hurdles ahead
For the digital detection of cognitive
decline to work, researchers need huge
amounts of personal data to be transmit-