Business
Award of Funding
Award of Funding.
About this update from Cambridge Cognition Holdings Plc
[{"type":"text","content":"\n \nRNS Number : 4067Q Cambridge Cognition Holdings PLC 12 September 2017 \n\n(\"Cambridge Cognition\" or the \"Company\")\nAward of funding to develop novel digital health system\n \nCambridge Cognition Holdings plc (Cambridge, UK - LSE: COG, 'Company'), the neuroscience digital health company, is pleased to announce it has been awarded £0.3m of R&D funding by the UK's innovation agency, Innovate UK, to develop a novel digital health system which will elicit and automatically analyse pain-related signals in human speech.\nThis pioneering new project will see Cambridge Cognition develop a digital health system for objective measurement of pain based on signals in a person's voice. It follows the Company successfully demonstrating the feasibility of automated verbal cognitive assessments on consumer voice platforms at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in July 2017 as detailed in the Company announcement made on 7 June 2017.\nChronic pain affects around 1 in 3 people worldwide. In addition to the physical and emotional burden it brings, the financial cost to society is huge, currently estimated at more than €200 billion per annum in Europe and $150 billion per annum in the USA.\nWhile many painkillers are available, they do not work for everyone and often have undesirable side effects. One reason it is difficult to develop better pain treatments is because there is no external way of measuring pain, other than by asking an individual to subjectively rate how much pain they feel.\nThe system being developed with Innovate UK funding will provide a non-invasive, inexpensive means of accurately monitoring levels of pain by combining artificial intelligence technology and cognitive neuroscience.\nThe system, based on automatic speech recognition, is expected to provide an extremely cost-effective tool in the development of new pain treatments, and ultimately help doctors to more effectively manage patients, reducing the global economic burden of chronic pain.\nIt further establishes the Company's strategy of combining consumer electronics and sophisticated analytics to automate the precise measurement of brain function, following the Company's recent demonstrations using the Apple Watch and Amazon Echo.\nInitial products for the clinical assessment of pain-associated voice biomarkers could be made ava...