Charlotte-based Amissa Health was awarded two grants totaling more than $3 million during the past month.
Amissa Health is a startup that generates real-world health and behavior data using Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AAPL) smartwatches to help prevent or slow Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Last month, the digital health company received a $505,000 Small Business Innovation Research Grant from the National Institute on Aging. It plans to use those funds to work with researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to advance its tools that predict preclinical Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
Amissa said today the National Institutes of Health awarded the company with another Small Business Innovation Research grant totaling $2.52 million. The startup intends to use that funding toward expanding its data analytics platform to help research scientists, medical providers and hospital systems access more diverse real-world health and behavior data sets, said Jon Corkey, Amissa's founder and CEO.
For that initiative, Amissa is partnering with researchers and advisers from Wake Forest Center for Healthcare Innovation, Massachusetts General Hospital and Duke University.
"The goal is to decentralize data collection methods, enabling broader demographic representation and generating exponentially larger data sets to advance future artificial intelligence and population health research," he told CBJ.
Amissa plans to use some of the $2.52 million grant to hire two or three more employees. It currently has four full-time workers and a college intern.
With the $505,000 grant, Amissa is partnering with Dr. Ganesh Babulal, an associate professor in Washington University's department of neurology and director of the DRIVES project. The initiative works to understand how preclinical Alzheimer’s disease impacts driving behavior. The DRIVES project will integrate data from Amissa's Apple Watch app to also monitor sleep patterns and physical activity, providing a more accurate prediction of cognitive decline.
Over the next year, Corkey said Amissa plans to use its Apple Watch app at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Washington University to advance its mobile health monitoring and data gathering projects.
It is also working to partner with dozens of NIH-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers to boost health measurements across diverse demographics and grow research activity within traditionally underserved and rural communities, he added.
