We know that it is a very common saying in the healthcare industry that prevention is better than cure and while this is true, most of our treatment right now is cure rather than prevention. For that, we need to develop healthcare systems that can prevent a disease with the help of early detection. That is where a company focused on brain health named Neurowyzr is working right now. The company says that it “wants to help more people get brain healthcare through tools like its online Digital Brain Function Screen”. For this reason, the company has also raised a seed funding round of $2.1 Million.
Neurowyzr co-founder Pang Sze Yunn says that “a lot of work in neurology currently focuses on treatment for serious brain conditions. But brain decline can start 20 to 40 years before a condition like dementia, mental illness or stroke emerges. As a result, early detection is crucial. Traditional brain tests like pen-and-paper tests can be affected by tester bias, while MRI and CT scans are expensive and inaccessible to many patients. Neurowyzr wants to address the gap with its digital neuroscience assessment tool, the Digital Brain Function Screen (DBFS). Meant to be faster and less costly than traditional cognitive testing, DBFS is currently used by healthcare organizations like Parkway Shenton, SATA Commhealth, Farrer Park Hospital, MHC Medical Centre (Amara) and O’Joy in Singapore. It has also completed a pilot with a large private hospital chain in India and is registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Singapore Health Sciences Authority and Australia Therapeutic Goods Administration”.
Pang adds that “DBFS can be completed in 15 to 20 minutes. It assesses a patient’s immediate memory, working memory, attention and executive brain function through a series of gamified neuroscience puzzles. For example, one puzzle has dots with a number on each scattered across the screen, and asks the users to connect them in order. Another shows a series of numbers that users need to memorize and then write in order. DBFS is hosted online, so patients can access it through a web browser link at home, though it was designed for primary care settings”.
