Janssen Alzheimer Immunotherapy and Pfizer Inc., together with the Geoffrey Beene Gives Back® Alzheimer’s Initiative announced that Team “Ginger.io” won the Alzheimer’s Challenge for 2012. The team’s ideas support the Challenge objective to develop a simple, cost-effective consistent tool that can be easily used to assess memory, mood, thinking and activity level over time to help improve diagnosis and monitor people with Alzheimer’s disease.
The winning team was selected during the Finalist Event held in Washington D.C on June 19, 2012 and was awarded $175,000 to help further develop their solution for commercialization. The Alzheimer’s Challenge 2012 provides an entrepreneurial springboard to harness new thinking and approaches to improve Alzheimer’s care.
The team’s winning idea is the “Ginger.io” Behavioral Analytics Platform. The “Geinger.io” platform is a combination of a mobile phone application and web-based dashboard. The platform passively tracks Alzheimer’s patients’ behavior relevant to their mood, memory, and functional status, and administers standard Alzheimer’s cognitive assessments. The assessments help to provide healthcare providers with a dashboard to measure patient health status, provides easy-to-interpret scores and novel data analytics so providers can follow new treatments and improve patient care.
“We are honored to win the “Alzheimer’s Challenge 2012” and help bring a new tool to the Alzheimer’s community that uses technology in a creative and effective way to help advance patient care,” said Sai Moturo, PhD, Ginger.io team lead. “We are eager to take our concept to the next level of development and we are grateful for the support we’ve received through this Challenge”.
