Why you should listen
Oftentimes, symptoms for Alzheimer’s disease appear when the condition is already too late to cure. For years, detection is gathered from blunt and unreliable tools such as a relative of a patient observing that the latter is becoming more and more forgetful. This prompted Dr. Ioannis Tarnanas to explore ways and tools for earlier diagnosis of dementia.
Ioannis created Altoida, the world’s first validated solution and iPad-based application to enter the market as a pre-symptomatic, computational biomarker that predicts the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease.
His company, Altoida Inc, provides health care professionals the “Neuro Motor Index” application which can detect early & subtle micro-errors (accuracy) and micro-movements (latency) during everyday function, up to 6 years prior to the onset of typical neurodegenerative symptoms like Alzheimer’s Disease.
Hear Dr. Ioannis speak at the WORLDWEBFORUM about how he’s helping make brain health assessment more affordable, accessible, and scalable.
About Altoida
What if you could detect Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) up to 6 years prior to its onset, using an iPhone only? Studies today show that if diagnosis would come 6-8 years earlier, you could prevent 1/3 of all dementia cases (targeting modifiable risk factors).
Altoida has developed a much more sensitive assessment of cognitive deficits by repeated and more ecological measurements day-by-day rather than a single shot in the hospital. ALTOIDA markers of cognitive function can be applied at very early stages of dementing processes at the intersection between preclinical and prodromal AD, when the global pencil and paper neuropsychological tests do not show significant abnormalities. After taking an iPhone app based test for 10 minutes, Altoida’s instrumental activities of daily living (iADL) methodology based on longitudinal clinical studies, provide “real-world” markers of cognitive function and monitor it over time with an accuracy of 94%.
Altoida Medical Device (AMD) is a class II medical device to screen and monitor cognitive outcomes. It supports neurologists to classify patients healthy, at risk, and with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) as a digital biomarker.
Biography
Ioannis Tarnanas, Ph.D., is a Senior Atlantic Fellow with a group leader position for Brain Health and Digital Biomarkers at the Global Brain Health Initiative, a joint research center between UCSF Department of Neurology and Department of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, where he also enjoys supervising and mentoring other GBHI fellows and students of the university’s Neuroscience Institute.
He is recognized nationally and internationally for his research on degenerative disease of the central nervous system. In addition, Dr. Tarnanas is an external collaborator of the Center for Digital Health Interventions (c4dhi.org), a joint initiative between the ETH Zurich and Dartmouth College USA. Dr. Tarnanas has received many awards and distinctions.
Those include the EU Archimedes award in 2001 for developing and testing Natural User Interfaces for medical devices, which would be compatible with cognitively impaired seniors, the 2006 European Open Science Forum (ESOF) award for his symposium on “virtual reality technologies for rehabilitation” and the Novartis AG award/fellowship on healthy aging in 2014 for his project, utilizing a variety of elegant techniques including artificial intelligence and digital biomarkers for the early screening of presymptomatic AD in older people.
During his career, Ioannis has been responsible for developing, executing and supervising clinical research and basic science projects. He has engaged internationally recognized academic experts and Research Institute Directors, as well as, industry partners to conduct translational research leading to product development, technology transfer and patents.
In addition, Ioannis has enjoyed teaching university courses (Neuroscience, Neurobiology of aging, Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Biomarkers). Specialties: Alzheimer’s Disease, neurodegeneration, cognitive impairment, digital biomarkers, activity tracking, clinical trials, regulatory affairs, reimbursement of medical devices.