MoodSpark Uses Audio Assistants and Reminiscence Therapy to Bring Comfort and Care to Isolated…

MoodSpark Uses Audio Assistants and Reminiscence Therapy to Bring Comfort and Care to Isolated Seniors

Eliot Arnold is a tech industry veteran who specializes in data-driven voice technology. While caring for his own aging father, he realized the potential for this technology to fight loneliness while also bringing relief to over-burdened caregivers.

Challenge

Within our Healthy Longevity & Aging Moonshot, there’s a numbers problem that overshadows almost every other challenge. We’ve written about it many times before, but it deserves repeating that the world’s population of people older than 65 is exploding. In 2019, there were 54.1 million people in this age bracket and it is projected to reach 94.7 million by 2060. Seniors are also living longer, which means a dramatic increase in age-related health problems.

The global increase in the population of seniors — and the fact that people are living longer on average — wouldn’t inherently be a problem if we had the tools and resources to respond. But there are two clear societal trends turning the aging world into a pending crisis.

One challenge is that we live in an increasingly isolated society. Hyper-independent family units and remote work and lifestyle preferences have all conspired to create a world where elderly people are often out of sight and out of mind. Seniors might appreciate “aging in place” because they’re comfortable at home, but it also means they’re likely to be lonely, which has real health implications. Researchers have proven that social isolation and loneliness increase the risks of a range of health conditions, from heart disease to Alzheimer’s, even increasing the likelihood of death.

Again, this paradigm would be manageable if we had a healthcare workforce trained and ready to care for the unique needs of seniors as they age. But we most definitely do not. There’s a workforce shortage — and rate of burnout — in the senior caregiver industry that is putting us on a true crisis course. We simply do not have the caregivers to handle today’s aging population, let alone tomorrow’s.

Tech companies have begun to respond to senior isolation with an emphasis on audio assistants (think Alexa and Siri). But the complex needs of patients with Alzheimer’s and other neuro-degenerative diseases are more than consumer electronics can typically handle. To take one very simple example, someone with Alzheimer’s would have a very difficult time remembering that they had to say “Alexa!” to turn on their Amazon device.

What if there was a purpose-built, always-on audio companion that could be there for seniors right when they needed it, alerting caregivers appropriately when there’s a problem, and then delivering personalized therapy to fight loneliness? Enter Eliot Arnold, founder of MoodSpark.

Origin Story

Eliot Arnold is a long-time tech entrepreneur who has specialized in automated, data-driven voice assistants. He sold his last company, a conversational interface for aiding data visualization, to Qlik, a Tableau competitor.

But it was in 2017, when Hurricane Irma was bearing down on Florida, that Arnold got a glimpse of the greater potential of voice technology. It started with a phone call from his father’s caregiver saying that he needed to come quickly to get his dad to safety.

“My father suffered from extreme anxiety which caused a lot of isolation in his life,” says Arnold. “His anxiety destroyed relationships which led to more anxiety.” That vicious cycle led to cognitive decline and a sedentary life, sometimes sitting in one place for 17 hours straight.

Luckily, Arnold was able to get his father on the last flight out of Palm Beach before the hurricane hit. But the event made it painfully clear that his father’s isolation and anxiety had led to serious health problems.

“He went downhill really fast after that,” Arnold recalls.

What was so eye-opening to Arnold wasn’t that his father was declining with age. It was how detrimental isolation had been to his health. He hadn’t had a stroke or a heart attack or even Type 2 diabetes. But he was isolated and anxious, and it became as deadly as a terminal disease. But then something happened that gave Arnold hope.

“One night in one of my dad’s typical depressed or anxious states, I showed him a picture of the first sports card he’d ever earned as a young professional. His whole physiology changed. He became flush. He leaned in. He was reanimated. He began talking fluidly about the time the photo was taken. It triggered this emotional memory that was very physically therapeutic. In that moment, I knew there was something here.”

Arnold’s initial hypothesis was that triggering long-term emotional memory recall could slow cognitive decline. He took that hypothesis to Dr. George Grossberg, the chief of geriatric psychiatry at St. Luke’s in St. Louis, Missouri. He was interested, but refocused the entrepreneur on an urgent downstream problem: helping caregivers manage moments of agitation, anxiety, or stress in the elderly.

So Eliot Arnold got to work creating a team and a MoodSpark MVP. Early in the company’s life, Arnold acquired Dthera Sciences, which gave MoodSpark a wealth of relevant IP, patents, an FDA Breakthrough Device designation, and clinical pilot research related to treating anxiety, agitation, and depression in elderly patients. Dthera’s technology was similar to what Arnold was building, so the acquisition allowed the team to leapfrog forward and speed up their go-to-market strategy.

Under the Hood

MoodSpark’s product currently consists of an audio companion that can be placed in a senior’s room and a platform utilized by their caregivers. The audio device remains on at all times, so there’s no need to remember an “awake word” and it’s able to detect shifts in mood anytime, night or day, and elevate events to the care team as necessary.

The first step, however, before the audio companion is switched on, is for the family of the patient to fill out a biographical profile. This is the personal outline that helps the platform — and the caregivers using it — respond to the patient in a contextual way. Next, the family uploads content from their life, such as photos, written documents, or social media feeds. This information forms the body of content that can be used during an intervention.

Imagine that an 85-year-old man with Alzheimer’s is living in a skilled nursing facility. His family has built out a personal profile and uploaded photos from his early life serving in the Navy. One evening he begins to get agitated, raising his voice in anger. It’s common for people suffering from Alzheimer’s and other neuro-degenerative diseases to experience a period of agitation in the afternoon and evening, often referred to as “sundowning.” The MoodSpark device in the man’s room picks up the change in his mood through his tone and registers that he may be experiencing anger or agitation. That audio event is flagged and sent to a dedicated “tele-companion” on the MoodSpark platform. This caregiver assesses the validity of the event and, deeming it low risk, beams into the man’s room via a video visit. During this tele-consult call, the caregiver is able to bring up images and stories from the man’s file, prompting a moment of reminiscence that helps him relax and de-escalate.

“We’re trying to serve two outcomes,” says Arnold. “We’re reducing social isolation and loneliness as well as addressing the need for an automated means of low-risk intervention in redirecting patients away from moments of anxiety. Highly personalized content is core to our therapeutic approach because we firmly believe that the human spirit can be cared for by sparking an emotional memory.”

MoodSpark is able to notify caregivers of an episode by whatever means fits the moment, from text message to automated phone calls. They’ve created an escalation plan for when they detect distress. Today, MoodSpark is embarking on a pilot program at Delmar Gardens, a 500-bed skilled nursing facility, that is going to enable them to prove that they’re alleviating burden for caregivers.

Why We’re Proud to Invest

Much has been written, and rightly so, about the vast and growing needs of the aging population. One reason we’re proud to back Eliot Arnold and the MoodSpark team is that they’re building a way to care for elderly patients while also caring for overburdened caregivers. We’re in the middle of a caregiver crisis and any senior care solution needs to recognize that there are two very human sides to this care equation.

“If we meaningfully move the dial by shifting caregiver burden onto our platform and taking on some of those low-risk interventions, that’s a big win for us,” says Arnold.

We’re also excited to back MoodSpark because Eliot Arnold has amassed a technical and clinical team that is at the forefront of audio assistants and geriatric psychiatry. In addition to Arnold and his co-founder Martin Bukowski, MoodSpark has an advisory board that includes top physicians representing clinical psychiatry and palliative care.

Finally, we’re excited to back Arnold and his team because they’re just scratching the surface on what’s possible in terms of audio assistants in healthcare and they’re well positioned to grow with the market.

“We’re still in the early stages of voice assistant technology, which means there are ample opportunities, especially when it comes to nuanced, personalized interactions,” says Arnold. “When you combine biographical content with these conversational interfaces, you have this whole fascinating realm of communication and diagnostics. Plus, there’s a lot of tech available to us that will help detect how para-verbal sounds represent certain potential medical issues, like stroke or depression.”

“I want support-assistive technology baked into the most familiar screens that seniors interface with on a daily basis. If that’s a television set, if it’s a phone, whatever. The component of synthetic companion care should be there in 10 years. We should not be as lonely as we are as people.”

Rather than replace the human touch, MoodSpark uses technology to apply human-led care in more effective and scalable ways. That’s good news for aging seniors and the people who care for them, and it’s a mission we can wholeheartedly get behind. Join us in welcoming Eliot Arnold and the MoodSpark team to the StartUp Health portfolio.

Connect with the MoodSpark team via email.

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MoodSpark Uses Audio Assistants and Reminiscence Therapy to Bring Comfort and Care to Isolated… was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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