Running around in public places, making a lot of noise; always interrupting when communicating with others; either misbehaving or “deserting” in the classroom …… Such “bear children” are often regarded as being naughty by nature. Often, they are considered to be naughty by nature. However, an overly active child is likely to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which is often referred to as hyperactivity disorder.
Screening and treatment of ADHD has been clinically difficult. Due to the lack of social awareness of ADHD, many children with ADHD are not diagnosed before school age – parents think their children are just naughty. It is not until the child enters elementary school and has problems with classroom discipline or learning difficulties that parents begin to realize that their child may be “different”.
According to the first “Epidemiological Survey of Childhood and Adolescent Mental Disorders in China” released in 2021, there are already as many as 23 million children with ADHD in China, but only 62% of children with ADHD receive oral medication. Among the children receiving treatment, 20% to 50% of them have poor or no response to medication, or have adverse reactions. Without timely intervention, 30%-50% of ADHD symptoms can persist into adolescence or even be lifelong.
For this reason, Dr. Sun Wei, Founder and Chairman of INFIBRAIN TECH, hopes to provide a digital full-course solution to child and adolescent psychiatric and psychological disorders, including ADHD, “to make effective mental health services within reach.” The three-year epidemic has spawned an explosion of many medical tracks, and Digital Therapeutics is one of them. With the popularization of mobile internet technology and devices, Digital Therapeutics has moved from concept to reality. Its mobility and universality can, to a certain extent, alleviate the problem of strained medical resources and change patients’ treatment and consultation habits.
First of all, Digital Therapeutics can be realized through computers, smartphones, wearable devices, etc., and is not limited by the time and place of remote intervention, which reduces the time and energy consumption of patients who have to repeatedly transfer to hospitals or offline orthodontic institutions. Secondly, Digital Therapeutics’ serious yet gamified design significantly increases patient engagement and compliance. Again, Digital Therapeutics is able to leverage artificial intelligence and big data to customize personalized intervention models for patients. Finally, for the healthcare industry, Digital Therapeutics has a low marginal cost, so it can expand the scope of treatment without expanding healthcare resources, improving access to treatment.
Currently, clinical trials have demonstrated that Digital Therapeutics can be equivalent to conventional medicines and therapies, providing patients with evidence-based disease management and treatment. And, in conjunction with other therapies, it can even have a 1+1>2 effect.
The inconvenient out-of-home environment during the epidemic amplified the advantages of Digital Therapeutics and stimulated countries to accelerate the approval of Digital Therapeutics products. In June 2020, the FDA approved Digital Therapeutics’ prescription “EndeavorRX” as a “video game prescription,” the first Digital Therapeutics product approved for ADHD treatment in the world. This is the first Digital Therapeutics product approved for ADHD treatment in the world, and the first time a Digital Therapeutics product has been allowed to be used as a “prescription drug” for medical treatment. This is also the first time that Digital Therapeutics products have been allowed to be used as “prescription drugs” in medical treatment. The approval of the first Digital Therapeutics product in China in November 2020 also marks the opening of a new track of Digital Therapeutics in China.
Prof. Gui Xue of the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning at Beijing Normal University has been deeply engaged in the field of cognitive and neural mechanisms of human learning and memory for decades, and has been committed to researching the cognitive ability of the human brain and improving cognitive dysfunction. At the critical juncture of Digital Therapeutics’ entry into the market, Prof. Xue, Dr. Sun Wei and Dr. Zhang Zibo, who have many years of entrepreneurial experience and are familiar with the market, co-founded INFIBRAIN TECH, a brain science-based intelligent medical enterprise focusing on children and adolescents’ mental health services. In addition, INFIBRAIN TECH has assembled a core team of world-class brain science, medicine, psychology, and computer science professionals from the University of Chicago, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, the Sixth Hospital of Peking University, and Beijing Tiantan Hospital of Capital Medical University.
INFIBRAIN TECH has three main product directions, namely Cognitive Neurology LAB, Emotion Research LAB and Artificial Intelligence LAB. If we compare Cognitive Neurology LAB to the foundation, we will study the physiological mechanisms of children and adolescents’ mental and psychological health and provide solutions for executive functions, so as to consolidate the physiological foundation. Then, the Emotional Research LAB is the building on the foundation, focusing on solving behavioral and emotional problems brought about by diseases from multiple perspectives, so that the child can get clinically observable improvements more quickly. Finally, the Artificial Intelligence LAB is added in order to better and more efficiently implement the results of the first two studies and provide “personalized” solutions.
Based on the above three product directions, INFIBRAIN TECH has built a Digital Therapeutics platform that covers screening, treatment and prognosis of ADHD in children and adolescents.
1. Screening stage: advancing the screening age to 3-6 years old
Screening is the most critical part of any disease diagnosis and treatment process, and this is also true for ADHD. The INFIBRAIN TECH product advances the age range of ADHD screening from 6-12 years old to 3-6 years old. Although 6-12 year olds are more articulate and at the height of ADHD symptoms, they are easier to screen from a screening perspective. However, patients in this age group have basically entered the elementary school stage, and if they fail to control their symptoms in time, they may suffer from low learning ability and poor grades, which will not only affect their further studies, but also cause anorexia, low self-esteem and even more serious psychological problems due to unhappy learning experiences.
Completing early screening at the early childhood stage will enable timely intervention during the critical period of development, and the earlier the child receives treatment, the better the long-term prognosis will be, and at the same time, it will also save the child and his/her family from the worries of the learning stage.
In order to make children aged 3-6 years old “sit still” during early screening, INFIBRAIN TECH incorporates the element of play into the program. While the children are playing the game, the screening system automatically evaluates their attention, self-control, memory, social skills and other cognitive functions, and then analyzes the most accurate results to determine whether the children are at risk of ADHD. This digital assessment is more accurate than traditional scales and is suitable for young children to complete.
2. Treatment: It’s not all about play
Accurate screening at the early childhood stage provides the best opportunity for ADHD treatment. However, China’s ADHD treatment resources do not match the large number of patients. In addition to limited medication, there are very few institutions that specialize in ADHD psycho-behavioral interventions, and only some of the first-tier cities are equipped with them.
INFIBRAIN TECH’s Digital Therapeutics platform allows more children to have equal access to healthcare resources across time and space. In the treatment phase, INFIBRAIN TECH demonstrates three main advantages, namely effectiveness based on science, personalization based on technology, and high compliance based on fun.
As the patients involved in the treatment are in the younger age group, and due to their diseases, they may have low concentration power. Therefore, how to make patients adhere to complete the treatment for a long time has become the key to the effectiveness of the treatment.
To address this issue, games have become the first choice for many digital treatment programs. However, the game designed by INFIBRAIN TECH is not a traditional “pass-and-stimulate” game. In the words of Dr. Zhang, “I prefer to call the game designed by INFIBRAIN TECH ‘the gym for the brain’.”
Just like exercising muscles in a gym, the same part of the body needs to be trained repeatedly to see results, so does mind training. INFIBRAIN TECH’s game will train the same thinking module of the patient over and over again, and consolidate it regularly according to scientific standards in order to solidify the effect.
In addition, INFIBRAIN TECH’s game mechanism is designed to adapt to the level of difficulty according to the patient’s completion. It will not let patients complete the game too easily and lose interest in the game, and at the same time, it will not make patients feel intimidated because of the difficulty span. The difficulty level of “reachable on tiptoe” enables patients to maintain better treatment adherence. From clinical data, INFIBRAIN TECH users achieved 92% compliance and improved their average TOVA ACS (Test of Variables of Attention, where an increase in score indicates an increase in the subject’s performance on the task) score to 0.93 in a one-month cycle.
Since ADHD patients often also suffer from co-occurring disorders such as oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, and tic disorder. Therefore, the treatment of ADHD requires a personalized treatment plan in addition to compliance. INFIBRAIN TECHDigital Therapeutics assesses the current level of development of children with ADHD through the measurement of five abilities: attention, self-control, memory, perception, and transformational skills, and identifies children who are relatively slow to develop and are in need of improvement. delayed and urgently need to improve several abilities. We compare the model with typical user models and select the most suitable model for the child from the basic information and distribution of abilities.
With the help of INFIBRAIN TECH’s self-developed knowledge graph and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, we screened out the training games that have the most obvious effect on the improvement of the abilities to be enhanced under the user model, and formed a complete set of personalized training programs. Only to provide the most relevant treatment services for ADHD patients with different co-morbidities.
3. Prognosis: Family members’ emotions also affect treatment effects
Digital Therapeutics cannot solve all the problems of all children. On the one hand, ADHD not only affects the patient’s behavior, but also has a negative impact on the psychological level. Many ADHD patients, after their behavior has been controlled, will suffer from anxiety and depression due to the experience of being treated differently when they were sick. In INFIBRAIN TECH’s view, after behavioral rehabilitation, psychological prognosis is also an important part of treatment.
On the other hand, the emotional problems of family members can also affect the treatment effect of ADHD. INFIBRAIN TECH has found in clinical research that many parents and other relatives of ADHD patients have anxiety, depression and other emotional problems due to their children’s health problems. The emotional problems of family members can also affect the outcome of ADHD treatment. Therefore, INFIBRAIN TECH has set up an ADHD family support system to help family members of ADHD patients with self-emotional relief, as well as to help children with emotional relief, to create a favorable objective environment for treatment.
INFIBRAIN TECH has also set up the “Borderless Future” Cloud Hospital, which serves as a carrier for screening and diagnosis, intervention and long-term management of children and adolescents with mental illnesses, providing effective, long-term and one-stop services. At present, Boundless Future Cloud Hospital has already obtained the Internet hospital license. Dr. Zhang said, “Only when the external environment is matched with the treatment means, can the child be fully recovered ‘from body to mind’.” , more suitable
Prof. Xue Gui’s rich scientific research experience has provided INFIBRAIN TECH with sufficient theoretical support, as well as a large amount of clinical data resources. According to reports, INFIBRAIN TECH’s digital treatment plan is based on the big data of 300,000 Chinese children, which is more in line with the needs of Chinese children compared with overseas homogeneous products. This has also been recognized by the clinical community. Currently, INFIBRAIN TECH products have landed in a number of well-known medical institutions, including public hospitals, private hospitals, rehabilitation organizations and focused institutions, completing a closed-loop commercial validation from 0 to 1. Next, INFIBRAIN TECH will explore commercialization into hospitals to further optimize its commercialization capabilities.
Market demand is constantly updating, which also drives INFIBRAIN TECH products to continue to iterate. If the initial personalized treatment plan can be called INFIBRAIN TECH 2.0, then INFIBRAIN TECH 3.0 and even 4.0 will provide more Chinese children and families with “1v1” targeted treatment plans. In the next step, INFIBRAIN TECH will continue to develop the advantages of AI, expand the database, and continuously optimize the “1v1” treatment model.