Check Engine Light for the brain

Our friends over at Tech Enhanced Life are working on an interesting project called “What is a “Check-engine-light for the Brain”?

Richard Caro described this idea a few years ago (here), in an article about “Gerontech Products we Wish Existed”.

The core concept of the Check-engine light,  has two parts:

·       There is some type of ongoing monitoring you can do that gives you a “score”, that relates in some way to “risk” of the thing you are monitoring (in this case cognition or dementia risk for example); and

·        There is some type of ongoing intervention you can do that can impact your score, so you can be proactive about maintaining “wellness”.

The innovators at Tech-Enhanced Life started to think it might be possible to create a sort of Do-it-Yourself (“DIY”) version of the check-engine-light for brain concept by combining some existing products.

Over the next view months, they will be exploring in this idea. Here is the idea (reprinted from their earlier article).

Cognition Monitor + History Over Time (+ Intervention?)

It's not news that Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are all too common, and big economic and clinical societal challenges. And for older adults facing the realities of growing older, the concern that something could happen to your mind is "a big deal". (See our "Topic Hub": Brain, Memory, Dementia Tech for background on this topic).

Of course, one can wait until one has dementia, and hope someone has come up with a "cure" by then. But for the more proactive, a preferred approach would be to try and "avoid it" — or reduce the risk of it happening to you.

 

There are two problems, which is where we see the opportunity for a new innovation.

Piece 1: Cognition Monitor

While not everyone wants something like this, there is a significant fraction of our explorer community who are interested in the idea of a "device" that could measure their level of cognition, and then track it over time.

And, if there was a proven intervention that could slow the decline of cognition, then the number of people interested in this would be much bigger.

An important aspect of this concept is that it would start to be used long before any cognitive decline manifested itself. In other words, it is a bit like an "engine warning light". It doesn't replace the visit to the doctor. It helps you remain "well" longer.

This "cognition monitor" would satisfy some specific criteria (see below).

Here are some critical features.

It does not need to be perfect, or absolute, although those would be good attributes. But it needs to measure and track a proxy for cognition or dementia risk over time. And tell you something about where you stand compared to some metric of "goodness or badness".

The cognition score needs to be given to you, as the older adult (ie you are in charge, not "the system") — with educational tools so you know what it means. It might need to involve a family member as well, or even instead, if there is significant cognitive impairment.

And ideally this would all happen at home, and not require a trip to see some type of healthcare person.

And it would be up to the older adult to decide who was allowed to see the cognition score, and what they would do about it (perhaps with pre-agreed involvement of a family member at certain score levels?).

And it would track changes over time. Because often it would be changes over time that would trigger a desire to "do something" rather than an absolute number.

And the score would need some peer-reviewed validation.

Especially important: the score would need to cover all the relevant aspects of cognition. It should not be limited to just one aspect (eg memory) if there are other aspects of cognition that matter for measuring dementia and cognition impairment.

In an actual product, maybe "cognition score" is the wrong terminology. This would need thought.

We note that clinicians today have some tools that let them measure aspects of cognition (they use these to help diagnose dementia, for example). These do not satisfy all the criteria above, but are an obvious starting point for this exploration.