TORONTO, December 11, 2015
Winterlight co-founders Katie Fraser, Frank Rudzicz, and Winterlight scientific advisor Jed Meltzer have discovered how to diagnose Alzheimer's disease with more than 82 per cent accuracy by evaluating the interplay between four linguistic factors. They have also developed automated technology to detect these impairments.
An initial release by the University Health Network can be found here.
The full study “Linguistic Features Identify Alzheimer’s Disease in Narrative Speech” can be found here.
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