Digital Neuroscience Companies Partner on AR/AI Diagnostics

(HypnoArt, Pixabay)

24 Feb. 2022. Two companies creating digital technologies for neurological conditions are collaborating on augmented reality and artificial intelligence in diagnostics. Financial and intellectual property details of the agreement between Altoida Inc. in Washington, D.C. and Click Therapeutics Inc. in New York are not disclosed.

Altoida develops assessments of cognitive performance to reveal indicators of brain health, packaged as smartphone and tablet apps. The company’s process uses exercises with immersive augmented reality games to portray daily life activities. The company says individuals’ responses to these exercises are scored for cognitive and motor skill indicators, with the collection of exercises taking only 10 minutes. The exercises are designed to measure cognitive and functional abilities, with A.I. algorithms used to correlate results to clinical and real-world indicators of brain health.

A recent study of 148 individuals, divided between 58 healthy persons and 90 in various stages of Alzheimer’s disease, evaluated Altoida’s digital measures against today’s clinical assessment questionnaires. Altoida conducted the study with the Innovative Medicines Initiative, and findings posted on the medRxiv pre-publication server in November 2021 are not yet peer-reviewed. Results show Altoida’s augmented reality test scores correlate with clinical questionnaire assessments, and better differentiate between Alzheimer’s disease stages than conventional questionnaires.

Develop more sensitive measures of cognition

Click Therapeutics creates software for treating neurological conditions based on artificial intelligence and data science. The company’s software pipeline includes therapies for disorders such as major depression and schizophrenia, as well as treatments for smoking cessation, insomnia, migraine, and other pain. Click Therapeutics’ Clickoteen product for smoking cessation is now on the market, with eight other software therapies currently in clinical trials.

The deal calls for the companies to collaborate on developing more sensitive measures of cognition, particularly for Click Therapeutics to use in its clinical trials of central nervous system or CNS disorders. “Through this partnership,” says Altoida CEO Travis Bond in a company statement released through BusinessWire, “Altoida and Click Therapeutics will be the first to scale the development of cognitive biomarkers using augmented reality across a number of CNS clinical trials to give patients insight into their brain health and provide a better and earlier understanding of how cognition affects CNS disorders.”

“Partnering with Altoida,” notes Shaheen Lakhan, chief medical officer at Click Therapeutics, “allows us to leverage their AI-driven augmented reality technology to help us better understand baseline measures of cognition and how it affects patient outcomes.” Lakhan adds, “Altoida’s proprietary digital cognitive assessment uses augmented reality to simulate real-world activities of daily living, which can be completed on a smartphone or tablet under 10 minutes, which we believe will accelerate insights into individual’s patterns of disease.”

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