MindMaze Healthcare, the global leader in digital neuro-therapeutics solutions with a mission to accelerate the brain’s ability to recover, learn and adapt, and the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), today announced that they have won the prestigious Innosuisse Grant to develop and study MindFocus, an innovative, immersive, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven virtual reality (VR) solution for cognition in brain damaged patients.
Using a multimodal approach to target all aspects of attention, the MindFocus intervention proposes gamified training activities with different levels of difficulty specific to the patient’s level of impairment in a personalized protocol and assessed by ad-hoc “burst” assessments. The digital therapeutic is easy to install and use, even for home-based therapy, and allows for remote monitoring by a therapist.
In line with MindMaze strategy, MindFocus is a scientifically-informed and novel approach inspired by the company’s drive to address the person holistically and develop innovative solutions where there are critical gaps in care. The Innosuisse Grant to validate and advance MindFocus will fund a study in which patients will be trained on different attentional functions in an immersive VR environment to try to demonstrate higher efficacy than standard of care therapies . The study will include activity titration to individualized levels of impairment via personalized assessments, training, and engaging therapeutic games to increase motivation and adherence.
“MindFocus is built as an innovative solution for adaptive and personalized medicine, and we are thrilled to work with the Neuropsychology and Neurorehabilitation Unit of CHUV and the Lavigny rehabilitation hospital to clinically validate its use for patients with acquired brain injuries,” said Andrea Serino, Head of Neuroscience at MindMaze. “The Innosuisse Innovation Grant will allow us to foster our research with patients at a premier global institution, in order to validate the solution and add AI-based data analytic features that will make it even more efficient for patients and clinicians”.
CHUV, one of the top ten hospitals in the world*, is also a long-standing strategic clinical partner of MindMaze to gather first-hand feedback from clinicians, as well as to co-develop innovative solutions like MindFocus. Further, the dedicated MindMaze Lab at CHUV allows for MindMaze to have direct access to neurological patients to test its solutions.
Stephanie Clarke, MD, Professor Emeritus and former Head of the Neuropsychology and Neurorehabilitation Clinic at CHUV and principal investigator of the grant, said, “This groundbreaking therapy addresses a gap in care for which there are no validated solutions. Attention is the foundation of all cognitive functions, and the most common cognitive deficit for people with brain injuries yet current offerings are relatively sparse and their effectiveness is often questioned. Our research will allow us to profile patients better and deliver therapy based on individual differences in brain lesions and behavior. The Innosuisse Grant highlights the promise of MindFocus, while our partnership with MindMaze provides us with a runway to validate clinically its efficacy and socio-economic value, and provide top-of-the-line care for patients at our hospital.”