Building a digital health product for Alzheimer’s disease detection — Eva Poggio and Nikos Green

Eva Poggio is one of the co-founders of RoX Health. She takes care of all company building topics and projects in the field of Neurodegenerative diseases. She is a certified Design Thinking coach from the reputed Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany.

Nikos Green is a Senior Venture Architect at RoX Health. He is a Neuroscientist with a medical background who is passionately committed to fight Alzheimer’s disease. Before RoX, he worked for a digital health incubator and has done consultancy work in the  healthcare sector.

Summary

In this podcast, Eva Poggio and Nikos Green dive into how RoX Health is helping startups developing digital health apps for the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease based on digital biomarkers. They lead us through an exciting journey of what it takes to bring a digital health app into the healthcare ecosystem.

There is much to learn and explore about what digital health holds in store.

Key Questions

12:40.28: …how is the clinical diagnosis done to confirm that somebody has Alzheimer’s today and how is that going to be done with the digital biomarkers?

 18:45.96:…are the elderly digitally savvy? In your experience that you’ve looked at people, are they digitally savvy to use these apps?

 25:13.20: Could you sort of give a brief overview of what it is like to engage with the process of getting something like this into the German market?

32:57.07: So now these companies that are making these apps, are they going to be having people to meet the clinicians, convince them of the software, maybe get the doctors on board?

37:00.07: Do you feel that today patients are ready to get information about the severity of the condition, which they are trying to monitor, maybe the graveness of the condition or the severity of the condition from a digital health app rather than from a human doctor?

Quotable Quotes

8:58.17: …all our focus at the moment is on early detection of this disease and we try out or we support start-ups that take different approaches to that…

10:06.85: Usually the challenge with this disease is also that it’s not only the patient, the human that has it, but also their relatives who care for them.

13:09.25:  Maybe one thing to clarify is that the digital tools that are available at the moment, I would always like to call them more or less assessment or screening tools because they are complementary to a fault diagnosis.

28:37.09:  I think that the topic of commercialization and making awareness of your product in the wide public and within the physician communities, that’s the next step that you need to consider.

30:39.71: …a lot of apps are downloaded used once and never again because it’s really hard to find what it’s really good for and I think at least in Germany, that role now goes a bit in the hand of the physician.

39:39.43: In the future we will all have a digital companion that helps us really to react immediately to the first signs that our body is sending but they are so subtle that ourself we cannot even recognize them. 

44:24.13: …physicians giving diagnosis in various disease areas to patients and there are a lot of questions that remain and I think here, Digital Health has a big potential to support that.

Notable Mentions

24:28.05: EndeavorRX – a first of a kind video game that is a US FDA approved digital therapeutic for kids with ADHD.

41:38.37: Yuval Nova Harari, author of the book – 21 lessons for the 21st century.

Connect

Website: RoX Health

LinkedIn: Eva Poggio Nikos Green

The You+AI Vodcast

A companion video segment full of fun and candid moments.

Check it out here!