BrainCheck raises $8 million to digitize cognitive/ neuropsychological assessments and better serve the aging population

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This start­up just raised $8 mil­lion to help busy doc­tors assess the cog­ni­tive health of 50 mil­lion seniors (TechCrunch):

“…star­tups increas­ing­ly rec­og­nize oppor­tu­ni­ties to cater to this aging pop­u­la­tion. Some are devel­op­ing prod­ucts to sell to indi­vid­u­als and their fam­i­ly mem­bers direct­ly; oth­ers are com­ing up with ways to empow­er those who work direct­ly with old­er Americans.

BrainCheck, a 20-per­son, Hous­ton-based start­up whose cog­ni­tive health­care prod­uct aims to help physi­cians assess and track the men­tal health of their patients, is among the lat­ter. Investors like what it has put togeth­er, too. Today, the start­up is announc­ing $8 mil­lion in Series A fund­ing co-led by S3 Ven­tures and Ten­sil­i­ty Ven­ture Partners.

We talked ear­li­er today with BrainCheck co-founder and CEO Yael Katz…

TC: You’re a neu­ro­sci­en­tist. You start­ed Bri­anCheck with David Eagle­man, anoth­er neu­ro­sci­en­tist and the CEO of NeoSen­so­ry, a com­pa­ny that devel­ops devices for sen­so­ry sub­sti­tu­tion. Why? What’s the oppor­tu­ni­ty here?

YK: We looked across the land­scape, and we real­ized that most cog­ni­tive assess­ment is [han­dled by] a sub­spe­cial­ty of clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy called neu­ropsy­chol­o­gy, where patients are giv­en a series a tests and each is designed to probe a dif­fer­ent type of brain func­tion — mem­o­ry, visu­al atten­tion, rea­son­ing, exec­u­tive func­tion. They mea­sure speed and accu­ra­cy, and based on that, deter­mine whether there’s a deficit in that domain. But the tests were clas­si­cal­ly done on paper and it was a lengthy process. We dig­i­tized them and gam­i­fied them and made them acces­si­ble to every­one who is upstream of neu­ropsy­chol­o­gy, includ­ing neu­rol­o­gists and pri­ma­ry care doctors.

We cre­at­ed a tech solu­tion that pro­vides clin­i­cal deci­sion sup­port to physi­cians so they can man­age patients’ cog­ni­tive health. There are 250,000 pri­ma­ry care physi­cians in the U.S. and 12,000 neu­rol­o­gists and [they’re con­fronting] what’s been called a sil­ver tsuna­mi. With so many becom­ing elder­ly, it’s not pos­si­ble for them to address the need of the aging pop­u­la­tion with­out tech to help them.” » Keep read­ing HERE

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