Empowered Patient Podcast Digital Assessments Offer Insight into Brain Performance and Cognitive Health with Dr. John Showalter Linus Health
Dr. John Showalter, Chief Product Officer of Linus Health, shines a light on the current methods of measuring cognitive health and emphasizes the need for a more holistic approach to assessing brain health. Linus works on digital cognitive assessment tools and AI models to detect cognitive impairment and early warning signs of Alzheimer's and other dementias. These tools also consider anxiety, sleep patterns, and lifestyle factors and support personalized care plans for patients and their caregivers.
John elaborates, "Right now, we have this performance-based understanding of cognitive processing and brain health. And I'm not sure that is the best way for us to be looking at brain health because, to me, as a primary care physician and someone who's very much into a more holistic view of the individual, brain health should be much more about your ability to achieve what you want to achieve, interact with the people that you want to interact with and have a higher quality of life. But there's not a real good definition of that."
"One of the classic tests that your primary care physician would use was called the Mini Cog. It's when you were asked to remember three words, draw a clock, and then, after drawing that clock, repeat the words that you were given. We have taken that and put it on an iPad with an iPad pencil. We now analyze not only whether or not you remember the words but the pattern of speech when you said the words, the pauses, and the intonation of your speech when you were repeating the words back."
"We also have multiple clock drawings, and because of the immense amount of sensors in the iPad and the iPad pencil, we're able to look at hundreds of features captured at 120 times a second and put them through machine learning models to understand how well an individual's brain is functioning. Then that translates very accurately to understanding if they meet the clinical diagnosis for cognitive impairment or the clinical diagnosis for dementia, understanding possible functional challenges."
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