Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CereBrill (Brain training tools for better focus - using games and brainwaves to improve performance in children with ADHD)

Teaser

Cortechs is addressing an exponentially growing brain-based health challenge impacting over 2 billion people and 1 in 9 children worldwide: the inability to reach the basic cognitive skill levels needed to maintain the attention needed for school, work, home and life. Cortechs...

Summary

Cortechs is addressing an exponentially growing brain-based health challenge impacting over 2 billion people and 1 in 9 children worldwide: the inability to reach the basic cognitive skill levels needed to maintain the attention needed for school, work, home and life. Cortechs create data-driven, therapeutic games that improve attention levels in children.

ADHD is expensive, it causes suffering and it impairs social and lifelong productivity for the child and their family. Each task a child partakes in needs their full attention to be performed successfully. While this statement may seem obvious, the reality is that current EU-wide approaches to treat these symptoms come at extortionate costs (trillions pa) to the European health and welfare systems with medication alone not tackling the core, cognitive skills affected in ADHD.

Our intervention provides games which can be played using your brainwaves on smart devices. Progress data can be remotely assessed by specialist clinicians to prescribe and amend individual therapies on secure web dashboards. Cortechs neurofeedback platform and gaming delivery system is a highly innovative, consumer facing solution in the cognitive healthcare market for ADHD. Therapeutics in cognitive impairments (CI) is a high-volume market valued at €80 billion and will grow to €393 billion market by 2022. Our Cortechs enterprise platform (called CereBrill) applies key evidence-based ADHD treatments in an end-to-end digital solution with access to easy-to-use, engaging smart brainwave games to improve their behaviours.

The solution is device agnostic, cheaper and accessible anywhere with prescriptives remotely and securely controlled and moderated by clinicians. This proposal would enable Cerebrill to be speedily commercialised to enterprise alongside a regulatory clinical validation process so Cortechs can offer Cerebrill as a therapy for improving attention symptoms in the ADHD healthcare space within 24 months.

Overall, CereBrill funded activities have occurred on a timely basis and in parallel to bringing CereBrill to a provisionally protected commercialisation stage for the UK and North American markets. Technology development objectives have been achieved over the last 12 months in order to support pilots, a clinical investigation, enterprise sales in healthcare and education and consumer sales via partner channels. This commercialisation effort is ramping up starting in October 2019, given CORT was granted a US provisional patent in September 2019.

Dissemination of the CereBrill features will be done via onboarding of test users on a staged-basis under a freemium model where most active and recurrent users will transfer into a paid model. Such a model is being defined based on the nature of national markets (private vs public health care), size of clinics and recurrence of applications used across end-users. The CORT business model will be largely influenced by a health economics study commissioned for the NHS public system in the UK.

A deviation in regard to the Clinical Investigation occurred but was remedied with the contracting of a specialized firm (Afortiori) in charge of the clinical liaison with ADHD specialists, in line with agreed protocol, ethics and data management guidelines. This deviation impacted on clinical claims that CereBrill can promote for the short term, but the platform can currently be offered as pilot technologies and wellness/assistive technologies as part of the ADHD pathway.

IP clearance in the form of a provisional patent also allows CORT to start promoting CereBrill applications, while clinical benefits are being identified prior to final patent application in 12 months’ time.

Work performed

In this first year of EU SME Instrument grant period, Cortechs has developed and protected its unique, configurable neurofeedback platform – CereBrill – to position it for immediate commercialisation in key growth markets – UK and North America - while its clinical claims are being proven. CereBrill has been designed to enable the add-on of games for all age groups older than 12 years old and for games to be set depending on level of cognitive ADHD deficits. The platform also controls real-time data-flows between wearables (headsets, headbands and electronic/smartwatches) via a set of APIs, native apps, and secure regional cloud infrastructure compliant with health care requirements.

In comparison to traditional competitors, CereBrill interfaces, data-flows, and applications can be easily configured to suit a mix of licenses to healthcare groups/clinics and to consumers/patients wanting to experience neurofeedback on a personal basis at home or in a context where the next-of-kin and/or teachers are involved in day-to-day management of ADHD-related issues.

Despite delays in our clinical investigation kickoff, we are currenting close to completion of the ethical approval process and will begin to test the effectiveness of our product with a clinical study with prestigious site partners St. Georges Hospital London under the auspices of globally renowned ADHD paediatrician, Dr. Serena Haywood. We have partnered with clinical trial partner Afortiori Development to ensure compliance and quality within our study from start to finish and we expect the study to be completed by Q2 2020.

Final results

Progress beyond the State of the Art for CereBrill is to be found in its platform design and architecture that enables, integrates and supports new types of neurofeedback applications beyond the native games currently in development. In fact, CereBrill is being extended into a set of APIs that can ingest biofeedback data, third-party data, and contextual data from cohort data that can originate from wearables such as consumer smartwatches, database of EEG data and/or ADHD scales, and big data from electronic repositories used in health care settings. This has been confirmed as an unmet pain point in ADHD by ADHD advocacy groups, parents and clinicians treating ADHD in the Ireland and UK markets.

CereBrill State of the Art will also be evident in supporting custom data workflows depending on the applications supported – native games, native apps, in-browser extensions – and controlling the user interfaces tailored for clinicians and their patients. This 2-year development will answer demands from patients and their next-of-kin and teacher(s) who want to have timely, relevant, personal information to support the management of ADHD. Based on a combination of Health Economics findings and clinical study outcomes in the coming months, CereBrill can have wider societal implications by launching and customizing applications targeted at age groups older than 12 years old and at other cognitive deficits such as autism, epilepsy, memory loss, and sleep deficits.

The combination of neurofeedback data with other biofeedback data types such as movement, exercise, heart pulses, sleep patterns, gamification data, native applications usage data will also widen the social impact that CereBrill can achieve over a medium-term period.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.cortechs.ie.