Harnessing Innovations to Recover Brain Performance
A team of global experts has published a roadmap for improving mental health by artfully combining various emerging, novel and proven technologies.
Many mental health disorders have multiple risk factors which need to be managed. For example, there are 12 modifiable risk factors for dementia, which include education, hypertension, hearing impairment, smoking, obesity, depression, physical inactivity, diabetes, low social contact, excessive alcohol consumption, traumatic brain injury, and air pollution. Therefore, therapies for these disorders need to address multiple issues. Unfortunately, these multiple risk factors are not all managed by individual clinical care solutions. This means individual tools and apps often do not have the desired, beneficial effects for patients. A new approach is required to harness multiple tools and apps to ensure holistic care, improved recovery and ideally prevention.
These issues are addressed in the new book, Convergence Mental Health: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Innovation, published by Oxford University Press. The Lead Editor of the book is Harris Eyre MD PhD, Co-Founder of the PRODEO Institute, focused on radical innovations to advance brain health. Contributors to this book are from eminent organizations including Milken Institute, Harvard University, Stanford University, APEC, OECD, One Mind, National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, Mayo Clinic and many more.
“The mental health field is clearly in desperate need for new and improved solutions for a diverse set of problems. These solutions are essential to optimize access, screening, diagnosis, treatment and prevention”, noted Dr Harris Eyre, a specialized brain health technology executive and Instructor in Entrepreneurship with the Global Brain Health Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. “Fortunately, there is a tremendous amount of interest in, and opportunities for, new technological approaches to addressing these challenges. Technologies, such as AI, VR, AR, multi-omics and sensors can be adapted into new products and services. Venture capital firms have recently made record-breaking investments in mental health, with USD $637 million invested in more than 60 different mental health supportive companies. This is almost 23 times the investment in 2013.”
Mark Heinemeyer, CEO of PRODEO, an executive group specializing in the commercialization of proven mental health technologies, notes that “with the emergence of so many digital innovations, care providers are presented with more tools than ever. However, such a crowd of novel options adds complexity and uncertainty. To be clinically useful, such solutions must first be vetted and then clustered into symphonies shown to play well together to optimize collective benefit for specific conditions. In the dementia field, for example, we are encouraged to see multi-domain interventions being deployed. ” In the future, a therapeutic guidance system may make sense, similar to those used to advance precision medicine in areas such as oncology and neurosurgery.
Convergence Mental Health provides a roadmap towards actualizing the innovations noted above. It intends to catalyze the development of a new wave of tools and techniques to help patients, families, clinicians and societies.
To learn more about the Oxford University Press book, Convergence Mental Health: A Transdisciplinary Approach Towards Innovation, see here.
For more information, please contact Harris Eyre MD PhD of the PRODEO Institute at harris@prodeobrain.com
