TORONTO, January 25, 2018
Winterlight Labs was featured on CTV news discussing its partnership with Revera, one of the largest senior companies in Canada. Winterlight Labs joined Revera's Innovators in Aging program to help facilitate piloting its speech-based assessment.
Winterlight will be piloting its speech-based cognitive assessment at one of Revera's senior care homes in Toronto with 50 participants over a 6 month period. Each participant will receive the Winterlight assessment once-per-month and will also receive a gold-standard pen-and-paper assessment at months 1 and 6 as part of a standard assessment of needs. The goal of the study is to 1) show stable test results from month 1 to 2 (e.g. test-retest reliability), 2. iterate on the assessment results UI/UX and 3) better understand the operational side of administering assessments in senior care homes.
This pilot was funded via the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) Health Technology Fund (HTF). "HTF fosters partnerships between publicly funded health service providers (HSPs), patients, academia and industry to drive collaboration that improves patient outcomes, optimizes the impact of investment in health innovation and scales health innovation companies."
Winterlight Labs is commercializing a proprietary language-based diagnostic system that analyzes natural speech to detect and monitor dementia, Alzheimer’s, aphasia, and various other cognitive conditions. Winterlight's scalable platform uses short recorded speech samples to analyze hundreds of linguistic cues, and can detect dementia and other conditions with a high level of accuracy. This is a major improvement over current pencil-and-paper tests which are time-consuming, costly, and difficult to administer. The platform has applications in drug trials, long-term and primary care, and speech-language pathology.
Since its founding, Winterlight Labs has seen strong interest from pharmaceutical companies and other potential partners who view the technology as a major improvement over current methods of detection or screening. The company has gained support from the pan-Canadian AGE-WELL Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE), the Ontario Brain Institute, Ontario Centres of Excellence, and the University of Toronto Banting and Best Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. For more information, visit www.winterlightlabs.com.
Media Inquiries:
Winterlight Labs
Liam Kaufman, CEO
liam [at] winterlightlabs.com