Transforming the prevention of dementia through digital

Dementia will remain the largest public health challenge in our lifetimes: it is expected to affect over 150 million people by 2050 with no treatment available to slow or halt the course of disease. It's not all bad news though. Between one-third and one-half of dementia risk is due to preventable causes like smoking, alcohol use, obesity and lack of social, cognitive and physical activity.

The processes in the brain that lead to dementia start 15-20 years before symptoms arise. So there is a huge opportunity to reduce the risk of developing the condition by making the right lifestyle changes during adult life. We believe the public is ready to take active measures to evaluate and control their risk for dementia - a study by ARUK found that about 85% of people are willing to take a test to check their dementia risk and to find out what they can do about it.

This is why we decided to build SharpTx with the vision to improve quality of life for hundreds of millions of people. Our mission is to build the first direct-to-consumer digital therapeutics platform to detect dementia risk and and prevent dementia, providing engaging, affordable and easy-to-use risk assessment and management tools for improving brain health. The app will also provide direct access to clinicians to help users to better understand their risk factors and how to make lifestyle changes to reduce them.

Our early product prototype is already live; in this project we will test when and how human interaction benefits users the most after their risk assessment and in the context of digital coaching to change their behaviour and reduce their dementia risk. This will be tested in a research study with our partners University of Oxford and Dementia Platform UK.