Cognetivity Neurosciences Ltd. announced that it has reached an agreement with Dutch telehealth company Luscii healthtech BV (“Luscii”) regarding the deployment of Cognetivity’s wellness app, OptiMind. Luscii will deploy OptiMind’s sophisticated cognitive measurement capabilities in order to better understand the impact of its innovative human resources policies and corporate wellness initiatives.
Luscii is a provider of remote monitoring services for patients with conditions ranging from cancer and diabetes to Covid-19. It is the Dutch market leader, deployed in over half of hospitals in the Netherlands, and is now active in several other countries, including the UK. This success has been underpinned by innovation, both in its products and services and in its approach to employee welfare. As Luscii rolls out a major new wellness initiative within the business, it will deploy OptiMind to give better personal insights to team members and improve its understanding, via aggregate data, of the overall impact of its investment.
“Luscii supports many thousands of patients and clinicians through remote monitoring.” said Professor Daan Dohmen, Chief Executive of Luscii. “Anything I can do to help improve the working environment for my colleagues will help them and, in turn, help patients and clinicians too,” he said. “Learning what works in this context has been challenging until now, but Cognetivity’s incredible technology opens up new and exciting possibilities for measuring the real impact of targeted programs and I look forward immensely to learning from the insights OptiMind will deliver.”
Employee wellbeing continues to assume growing importance in the business world, with the global corporate wellbeing market forecast to expand from US$53.6 billion in 2018 to US$90.7 billion by 2026. Large employers in the US spent an average of $762 per employee on wellbeing programs in 2019. However, the return on such investments remains unclear, with firms unable to quantify program impact at either an individual or organizational level.
Meanwhile, consumers remain increasingly keen to use technology to track aspects of their physical health, such as activity levels, weight and heart rate – but the prospect of day-to-day measurement of brain performance, particularly in relation to core lifestyle factors such as sleep, exercise and diet, has remained elusive. On top of all this, the pandemic has disrupted working norms. Many people are working from home and therefore unable to access the formal and informal support networks and wellbeing initiatives ordinarily available in the office environment.
OptiMind sits at the confluence of these major global trends. It is a wellness app, created for easy use by consumers, that is nevertheless supported by the same medical-grade cognitive assessment functionality that powers Cognetivity’s flagship clinical product, the ICA. Geared towards the personalized tracking and management of cognitive performance, it is also designed to enable feedback loops between employees and employers for the monitoring of wellbeing and risk. Optimind is also designed with enterprise scale in mind, being capable of serving the needs of millions of concurrent users around the world.
“Many progressive employers have strived to increase the impact of mental wellbeing efforts in the workplace to better support their employees and improve efficiency,” explained Dr Sina Habibi, Cognetivity’s CEO. “Crucially, OptiMind makes it practical and cost-effective to measure the impact of these initiatives. With OptiMind based on the same underlying science and technology that underpins our clinical products, and therefore benefiting from not only clinical validation but also speed and ease of use, our fundamentally different approach to cognitive testing is now opening an entirely new way for companies to support their staff. This is very much the future of working and looking after employees in and out of the workplace, using tools like ours to proactively look after health and improve productivity and safety.”
“The work that Luscii is doing in this area is enormously exciting and we are honoured to be able to contribute to it,” he added. “There has never been a more important time to look after your employees, and there has never been a tool quite like OptiMind to help you to do so.”
The Company also granted 80,000 stock options to employees of the Company exercisable at a price of $0.84 per common share for a period of 5 years from the date of grant.
