Modality.ai was recently announced as the co-winner of the Pitch Perfect contest at the MedCity INVEST conference in Chicago. This blog discusses the company, its product, and how it is using artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the healthcare field of neurological and psychiatric assessment for a range of debilitating disorders by combining conversational AI and computer vision technologies.
Modality.ai’s Tina is enabling doctors and clinicians in the field of neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Who is Modality.ai?
Modality.ai, based in San Francisco, is led by CEO and founder David Suendermann-Oeft. Modality.ai has developed a clinically validated self-service assessment system for neurological and psychiatric disorders, including ALS, Parkinson’s Disease, and autism. Modality.ai has partnered with some major universities and hospitals specializing in these disorders such as Massachusetts General, UCSF, Purdue University, University of Texas, Charité University, and NYU Langone Health.
Modality.ai software has been used in numerous Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved clinical studies to measure patient conditions and assess how well a particular drug might be working. Participants are interviewed by a digital assistant named Tina who uses verbal and visual observation powered by AI to evaluate the patient’s condition accurately and objectively.
These clinical studies have included assessment of ALS, Parkinson’s disease, autism, depression, and schizophrenia. Modality.ai’s pipeline expands this list to include assessments for Alzheimer’s disease, Lyme disease, laryngectomy, and post-stroke impairment as well as others.
Tina Revolutionizes Healthcare Assessments
Neurological and psychiatric assessments have historically been conducted by technicians who interview patients individually to assess their vocabulary and movement patterns to diagnose and monitor the progression of various disorders. This is very labor-intensive for humans and doesn’t scale well, especially in large clinical trials.
By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of conversational AI and computer vision, Tina is able to engage the patient in conversation to assess their vocal and cognitive skills while using computer vision to analyze their facial and movement patterns.
Since many Tinas can be used to interview many patients in parallel, researchers and clinicians are now able to receive all patient assessments in near real-time. One large 1.5-year clinical trial for ALS research and treatment used Tina to assess 600+ patients with 11,000+ sessions, providing researchers with rich data to come to the following two impressive conclusions:
- Frequent and continuous monitoring of acoustic and visual speech markers can capture objective physiological changes that may not be captured by subjective scales like the ALSFRS-R instrument, the current clinical standard to track progression in ALS.
- Changes in these audiovisual metrics could serve as potential digital biomarkers, which could contribute toward patient stratification and tracking of outcomes following pharmaceutical interventions.
Tina enables patients to be interviewed from home without the need for any specialty software or applications. All that’s needed is a device that can run a browser with a camera and microphone (any laptop, Chromebook, smartphone, or tablet).
Bottom Line
Modality.ai’s Tina is enabling doctors and clinicians in the field of neurological and psychiatric disorders to assess a patient’s condition much faster, but more importantly, to gather a broader set of data in a much shorter period of time during clinical trials. This will allow them to correlate the response of certain treatments with a higher degree of accuracy, leading to more effective and efficient clinical trials.