A Swiss startup, Improving Brain Health early!
We are a small team with a big ambition. We are putting our combined experience of more than 100 years to work in developing myAVOS, a digital health platform that will use widespread mobile and wearable technologies (such as smart phones, tablets, smart watches and rings, smart suits, etc.) to monitor cognitive, sensory and motor changes in people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, and to deploy personalized interventions to help reduce stress and improve quality of life.
Imagine you wake up in the morning and you don’t know what day of the week it is, what month, or even what year… You go into the kitchen to make coffee and you can’t remember where the coffee is. You feed the cats. Or did you already? You take the clean dishes out of the dishwasher, but you’re not sure where to put them. You shrug your shoulders and go get the newspaper. You sit down with a cup of the coffee your loved one made and read the paper. You read the same article several times. When it’s time for dinner, your loved one prepares the meal because you can no longer follow the recipe, unsure whether you already put that ingredient in or not. The dish just doesn’t taste like it used to. Ice cream for dessert? Now that always tastes good! After dinner you watch TV. Something on the news disturbs you. When the news is over you can’t remember what it was, but the feeling still lingers. You start to feel anxious. You go to bed feeling angry. Then depressed. You cry.
What you just imagined is, in a nutshell, just a regular day in an early Alzheimer’s patient’s life. In reality you are hopefully in great health. Even if you are far from your mid-sixties, when symptoms first appear in most people with Alzheimer’s, you will get there one day while some of your loved ones may already be in that age group.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia among older adults. It represents a major and rapidly growing problem. Today, about 47 million people worldwide are living with dementia. That number is expected to grow to 75 million people in 2030 and to 132 million in 2050. In the USA alone, Alzheimer’s disease is already ranked as the 6th leading cause of death, and the number of people suffering from it has increased by 89% to more than 5 million since the year 2000.
Despite enormous capital investments drug development has been problematic, and it is generally accepted that the likelihood of reversing Alzheimer’s disease decreases dramatically as it advances. Accordingly, there is an acute need to detect the disease at early stages.
While the cause of Alzheimer’s disease remains a mystery, we know now that so-called ’modifiable risk factors,’ like high blood pressure, cigarette smoking and alcohol drinking, can accelerate the cognitive decline caused by all forms of dementia while physical exercise, diet, educational attainment, leisure and social activities can help slow it down.
myAVOS will provide continual personalized support and easy access to a combined digital delivery of remote diagnostics, remote monitoring, and remote interventions tailored to the individual condition and needs of every patient.
With your support, we will launch myAVOS as a fully operational CE-certified medical device first in German speaking Europe in Q2/2021, followed by the United Kingdom, the EU and the USA.
Thank you very much for helping us improve brain health early!
My project is special because ...
myAVOS is a high-tech digital health application that uniquely combines state-of-the-art biomedical, behavioural, computing and engineering research to deliver fully personalized end-to-end care.
This is what I need backing for.
We need your support to accelerate the development of a minimum viable product (MVP) for launch in Q1/2021.