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Sens.ai Founder Paola Telfer on staving off cognitive decline and extending peak performance with transformative neurotechnology.
In an era where cognitive enhancement and mental well-being are paramount, Sens.ai emerges as a trailblazer with its innovative at-home brain training system. This pioneering technology seamlessly integrates neurofeedback, heart coherence training and transcranial photobiomodulation to offer users a comprehensive approach to enhancing cognitive performance and overall wellness. By personalizing each training session, Sens.ai empowers individuals to unlock their brain’s full potential from the comfort of their homes, democratizing access to advanced neurotechnology and paving the way for improved healthspan.
Longevity.Technology: By harnessing the power of neurofeedback and other cutting-edge technologies, Sens.ai is redefining cognitive enhancement, offering both at-home users and clinicians an innovative approach to brain training. We sat down with CEO Paola Telfer to explore how Sens.ai is pioneering personalized neurotechnology, its role in optimizing brain performance across different life stages and why a proactive approach to cognitive longevity is more crucial than ever – especially in an era where mental sharpness directly impacts quality of life. Plus she shares her thoughts on why the brain needs its own version of Ozempic. ..
Paola Telfer on…
A comprehensive platform for your brain
Technology like neurofeedback, transcranial photobiomodulation, heart coherence and biofeedback has been around for decades – neurofeedback for more than 50 years. Neurotechnology is a powerful modality, but I wanted to make it smaller, cheaper and more accessible – and that became a driving passion for me. Sens.ai‘s at-home brain training system is very comprehensive, especially compared with the various point solutions that one might see on the market. Each element of our technology stack is very deliberately combined within protocols that exist, and the protocols are both personalized over a multi-month period but they’re also adaptive in real time. The essence of it is a comprehensive approach, a lifetime coach. It’s not just about focus, it’s not just about getting calm – it’s about all of those peak states in between. Once we look at someone’s blocks – whether that’s sleep or anxiety or attention – we also start unlocking other aspects of their mental capacity.
Our design was centered around the minimum effective dose of tech – we didn’t want to create a different device for like every protocol, which is why it’s so comprehensive. 15 minutes, three times a week, that’s it. There’s no interference, you can stack it with other tech, it’s incredibly efficient.
Backed by science
We know we can look at the aging brain and this is where longevity fits in. Our GeniusPulse controller effectively does a Flanker test, an ERP test and measures brainwaves, looking at working memory signaling, impulse control, decision-making and more. It’s a rich data set that we’re able to collect, and we’ve found that we have over a hundred biomarkers that track with chronological age. What is really promising, is that they all have different signatures, they all have different curves – they’re not correlated with each other, they’re independent. And with that, we’re building a biological brain age clock in partnership with the Buck Institute, which we’ll be releasing as a feature, hopefully within a year. We are a company that’s looking at biological brain age aging, and with the protocols that we have in place now, we are able to reverse that. Our recent white paper on a cohort aged 31 to 83 showed our platform can improve people’s processing speed by 10%, improve reaction time by 7% and reduce errors on the Flanker test by 40%. These scores do not improve with time – they get worse with age, but because of our system design, that protocol improves instead. It’s a closed loop system that’s learning and the protocol is adapting, so give us a year and it’s going to be even better!
Scaling up
Now we’re at a point where our data is showing efficacy and now people are getting excited. We’re doing our series A now, and expanding into clinics. We are going to be launching our first clinical product next month – one of the flagships will be the Lake Nona Performance Center in partnership with Deepak Chopra – and we have a number of really great clinics that are going to be pilot sites. Clinics can stack transcranial photobiomodulation, for example, with HBOT, a CVAC, or an IV treatment, and in just shy of a year, we’ll have the biological brain age clock added to that portfolio in the clinical environment, so that’s pretty exciting!
Prevention and intervention
Both with at home use and in the clinic, we see our platform as an interventional tool. Our massive transformative purpose is to do very early detection of cognitive decline. So way before it’s dementia, even before it’s MCI. Right now we can see mild cognitive impairment quite clearly, but can we actually see it earlier than that? Early indications are that we can start to see some of the decline even as early as 20 to late twenties, so could we start to reverse it at that stage? We’re in talks with MIT Lab and we’ve been approached by Harvard Medical to also do some data collaboration. Collaboration is the key here – we can’t go fast enough! There’s so much data to analyze, and when data sets are combined, it gets really, really powerful.
Our focus is on staving off cognitive decline. How can we extend our peak performance? If our peak is early 20s in terms of mental cognitive biomarkers, can we extend that and can we prevent it from declining? Who wants to live to 120 or 150 if you’ve lost your cognitive faculties? That a fear I know a lot of people share, so I hope that Sens.ai takes off and becomes Ozempic for the mind – the world needs it.
Photographs courtesy of Sens.ai