TORONTO, July 27, 2021
At the Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC), Winterlight Labs presented new research on how speech is affected in Alzheimer's disease and other dementias.
In collaboration with Genentech, Winterlight analyzed speech from recordings of open-ended questions from the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) interview, using data collected as part of Genentech's Tauriel trial. Winterlight technology was used to examine how both the acoustic and linguistic content of participants‘ responses related to overall disease severity in prodromal and mild Alzheimer's disease. Initial results showed significant associations between the vocabulary and complexity of language and multiple measures of cognition and function.
Other Winterlight poster presentations included a collaboration with Dr. Jed Meltzer's lab at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest, examining how speech patterns relate to measures of executive function, and a comparison of speech qualities across different types of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease, Frontotemporal dementia and Parkinson's disease.
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