FBT · Transforming Brain Rehabilitation
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-06-01 → 2019-12-17
- EU contribution
- €182,509
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-SE
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Results in brief
Transforming Brain Rehabilitation
The problem: The world faces a global health challenge as 1 Billion people suffer from neurological disorders (220.7 million people in Europe alone), and characterized by motor, cognitive, and/or affective disorders, leading to morbidity and mortality. This poses a huge social and financial challenge for health systems internationally. Unfortunately, the world is moving fast towards an ageing crisis as international health systems are not well prepared for the change. This brings an increasing demand for fast and accurate clinical diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment. Importance for society: There is therefore an urgent need for affordable, accessible, efficient, personalized, and scalable holistic brain tools to assist clinicians and improve the lives of the many in need worldwide. Overall objectives: My goal is to democratize neurological diagnoses and treatments, finally bringing the neurology discipline to the 21st century, in line with many other medical disciplines. For that, I leveraged technological advancements – including depth cameras, smartphone sensors, cloud computing, and Big Data – to improve treatment, diagnosis, and symptom management of neurological patients. Main project results: Created and validated two products providing holistic brain tools for the treatment and monitoring of neurological disorders, including a virtual reality full body motion-based platform for cognitive training (the Functional Brain Trainer), and a smartphone app with digital versions of standardized neurological assessments used as a clinical decision support software (EncephaLog).
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Multiple diseases, injuries, and aging, may lead to executive dysfunctions, reducing quality of life. Intendu transforms brain rehabilitation, by introducing a novel platform of video games designed to train executive functions (EF). The games involve natural body gestures, and are adaptive in real-time to performance. Preliminary results show that training with Intendu’s games is safe, leading to improved cognitive function. Robust evidence for the efficacy of Intendu’s training program and brain plasticity mechanisms driving functional benefits is required. During this fellowship, and under Dr. Son Preminger’s supervision, founder and CEO of Intendu; and of Drs. Debbie Rand and Doron Freidman, established researchers in virtual reality (VR), I will (1) receive a unique opportunity to combine my scientific passions – cognitive training and motor learning, video gaming and rehabilitation, basic and applied neuroscience – into one multidisciplinary, strongly founded field; (2) deepen my knowledge with executive functions; (3) broaden my experience with multiple clinical populations; (4) acquire regulatory and intellectual property legislation knowledge and experience; (5) grow my leadership skills; (6) gain working experience in a young startup. Building on these critical skills, and on my previous experience as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and senior scientist at Posit Science Corporation (PSC), I hope to: (1) lead Intendu’s research with local and international collaborators; manage a network of external research partners; build and manage Intendu’s research team; (2) define scientific foundation for games with Intendu’s product team; (3) assure research funding; (4) work closely with regulatory consultants to manage regulatory affairs, to clear the program as the first motion-controlled software-based medical treatment for cognitive impairments. Together, this fellowship will open my best career possibilities.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union