philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Virtual-reality system for the elderly wins health care prize

At last night’s MIT Sloan Healthcare Innovations Prize pitch competition, Rendever earned the $25,000 grand prize for creating a virtual-reality platform that gives residents in assisted-living facilities the chance to explore the world virtually. The platform also provides cognitive therapy and tracks movement data to aid in early diagnosis of dementia.

“We’re using virtual reality to improve the way we age, so you don’t become isolated, don’t become depressed, and you can keep your mind happy and healthy,” said Rendever co-founder and CEO Dennis Lally, an MIT Sloan School of Management student who launched the startup with classmate Reed Hayes.

In the team’s winning pitch, Rendever said its system includes multiple virtual-reality headsets, custom software, and a tablet. The software syncs headsets together, so users can join together in a virtual world, visiting childhood homes, exotic locales, sports games, or a relative’s wedding across the world. The headsets can be controlled simultaneously by caregivers, using the tablet. All content is also custom-made by Rendever, based on 20 million gigabytes of content mined from the internet.

Apart from providing a socializing tool, the system can double as a form of reminiscence therapy, which involves discussing past experiences, with aid of photographs, familiar items, and music — or virtual cues, in the case of Rendever.

According to trial studies, Rendever’s system has increased overall resident happiness at the Brookdale Senior Living Community in Massachusetts by 40 percent, Lally said. The startup is currently working with the MIT AgeLab to validate those statistics.

Rendever also hopes to leverage virtual-reality data to aid in diagnosing dementia, which currently relies on qualitative studies and expert opinion. “We’re creating a data-driven [diagnostics] solution,” Lally said.

Users are asked to work through real-life simulations, such as making dinner, completing a series of tasks. In the process, Rendever’s software collects thousands of data points per minute on movement, reaction time, and executive function. All this can lead to earlier interventions for dementia patients and help measure the efficacy of treatments.

“We can track very precisely how someone moves through this space, and what they were doing,” Hayes, Rendever’s chief operations officer, told MIT News. “We also built a machine-learning model that’s currently being trained to help find patterns [characteristic of] someone who has early-stage dementia versus someone of healthy mind.”

Rendever’s prize money will help fund research and development, with a second trial study kicking off soon. Hayes attributes the team’s win to tapping into an underserved need. “Everyone has a parent or grandparent who’s getting older … and not much can be done when they can’t leave the house,” he said. “The solution we built is a fun way for them to re-experience the world again, to be explorers. We’re bringing that to a demographic that has lost the ability [to explore].”

Last year, Rendever entered the pitch competition — its first entrepreneurship contest ever — and made it to the semifinals round. By refining the business and technology through MIT classes at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship — under the watchful eye of managing director Bill Aulet — the team came out on top, Reed said. “It’s this awesome story for us to come back [to the competition] and win,” he said.

See the full story here: http://news.mit.edu/2017/virtual-reality-elderly-sloan-health-care-innovations-prize-0224