Marketplace Details
App4Independance
A validated joint venture digital therapeutic with Canada’s largest mental health provider CAMH. The App4Independenc (A4i) is a clinical portal and mobile app to reduce isolation, improve care coordination, and predict readmissions in schizophrenia and psychosis.
What is A4i?
A4i is software as a medical device (SaMD) for severe mental illness (SMI).
A4i is a trans-diagnostic tool addressing several symptoms related to psychosis spectrum illness and Schizophrenia.
A4i is a patent-pending tool for auditory hallucination detection to help patients decipher between environmental noise and auditory hallucinations. A4i uses Sleep detection, NLP, and mood biomarkers for readmission risk prediction.
A4i is a remote monitoring, adherence, care-coordination tool for tele-mental health enablement and engagement connectivity.
The clinician and patient co-designed app and clinical portal personalizes engagement to individuals using a data-driven (social) feed, notifications, and messaging. Personalization is refined during the intervention experience based on responses to ongoing assessment notifications and ambient phone data (sleep data determined by overnight phone activity and objective usage statistics such as refreshes and feature use).
Currently in later stages of validation, A4i provides a symptom based ‘toolkit’ featuring a patent-pending ambient sound detector function to help users determine the difference between ambient noise and auditory hallucinations.
- Further, the ambient audio detector provides a method based (gamified) feature function to facilitate a cognitive-remediation-based approach to building compensatory skills to, bypass impaired cognitive networks and improve functioning.
Currently In Use By: California Mental Services Authority (CalMHSA) Riverside University Health System, The Centre for Addiction & Mental Health (CAMH)
Resources
- Visit A4i.me
- Intro Video from Riverside University Health System
- Dr. Sean Kidd Presents A4i at #MOVES22 Symposium
- PLOS One: Feasibility and outcomes of a multi-function mobile health approach for the schizophrenia spectrum: App4Independence (A4i)
- 3 Minute Descriptor Video from CAMH Innovation Contest Winner A4i 2021
- Can An App Be Medicine?
- A4i Executive Summary
- Riverside County Evaluation Report
- Optimizing a novel digital health platform for schizophrenia-spectrum populations: From trials, patents, and concepts to "real world" clinical implementation in a California health system.
- Exploring Contextual Factors Impacting the Implementation of and Engagement with a Digital Platform Supporting Psychosis Recovery: A Brief Report
Schizophrenia
- Schizophrenia accounts for 6.9 billion dollars in healthcare costs and lost productivity making adherence to pharmacological treatment (“a therapeutic alliance”) essential.
- Effective services are hampered by illness complexity and complicated by issues such as medication adherence (<50%) difficulties, low activity levels, social isolation, and cognitive challenges.
- 23% are readmitted within 30 days of discharge, with average cost of readmission $7,200.
- $11.4 billion spent on hospitalization, of which $1.1 billion resulted from readmission within 30 days.
Why A4i?
A4i is a response to the gaps in the current system of care for individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses. A4i is an evidence-based, digital therapeutic intervention (DTx) (mobile app and clinician dashboard) with a regulatory pathway, patent pending features and early publications. A4i supports recovery, care coordination and community functioning while using machine learning to identify relapse risk for complex behavioural health.
Feasibility testing involved 38 individuals with psychosis, primarily with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder diagnoses.
The study investigated:
- App Usage
- Quantitative Outcomes
- Qualitative Feedback
Results highlighted high user engagement and retention rates of 100% at 7 days and 94% at 20 days. Significant improvement in engagement with personal recovery in areas such as hope, knowledge about illness, and self- efficacy were also observed.
Those with more significant mental health challenges at baseline tended to use the app the most frequently.
The Team
A4i is a joint venture between CAMH and MEMOTEXT that is led by cross-functionally experienced digital health, digital therapeutics, clinical and commercialization team.
- Dr. Sean Kidd PhD.
Chief Scientific Officer
Sr. Scientist, Psychology Div. Chief CAMH, Assoc. Professor, Psychiatry, Univ. of Toronto - Amos Adler, M.Sc.
- Chief Executive Officer
- 9+ years Digital Health Executive CEO of MEMOTEXT DTx platform
- Wenjia Zhou, MHI,
- Product Lead
- 5+ years UI/UX, product lead and project manager
- Mohini Bhavsar, BSc.
MBA Commercialization & Partnerships
12+ years digital health commercialization
- Dr. Sean Kidd PhD.