Combating Disease through Innovation and Mobile App Design
How Valere’s team of Software Engineers Partnered with Johns Hopkins University to Create an Application for their Alzheimer’s Research.
Alzheimer’s is the 6th leading cause of death in the United States, with over 120,000 deaths a year. The disease provides significant stress and burdens on families, who have to bare the stress of caring for their family members.
In 2021, Valere partnered with Johns Hopkins University Medical school (Kuchibhotla Lab) to combat Alzheimer’s disease. Valere helped graduate researchers, doctors, and scientists at JHU to design an application that gathers data on Alzheimer’s patients that is pivotal to better understanding and curing the disease.
We sat down with Valere’s founder Guy Pistone to discuss why this is a meaningful project to him and how this app will help Alzheimer’s research for years to come.
Q: What is Kuchibhotla Lab and what are they currently studying in regard to the brain?
Guy: Johns Hopkins University Medical School’s Kuchibhotla Lab is a team of researchers dedicated to studying the distributed network of brain regions that relate sensory inputs, rewards, and context during learning. Kuchibihotla’s long-term goal is not only to understand normal brain function but to use these insights to make headway into treating intractable neurological disorders, like Alzheimer’s.
Q: How did this partnership come about?
Guy: The researchers at Johns Hopkins University Medical school were in the process of researching Alzheimer patients learning patterns. They wanted to create an application that would help them gather better data on their patients to help them with their research.
JHU had heard of Valere’s work in the healthcare space, which triggered them to reach out to not only design the application but build it as well.
Q: Why is this project of particular importance to you?
Guy: Alzheimer’s took the life of my best friend back in October 2020, my father. He had been battling the disease since 2014, diagnosed in 2015.
My father was an extremely educated and intelligent man, making his decline and mental acuity very apparent. I feel if he wasn’t so intelligent, his decline wouldn’t have been so noticeable. In 2017, I had moved to Los Angeles to build a company I just raised venture capital for, but in the middle of 2018, after seeing my father decline so rapidly, I had to come back home to Boston to help take care of him.
The last two years of his life were extremely difficult for my mother and me. It drained us emotionally, physically, and financially. But as hard as it was for us, I know it was exponentially harder for my father. My father, being a very optimistic and stoic individual, I knew felt humiliated that he couldn’t drive anymore, use the bathroom by himself, and in the last few months hardly walk.
I still have the words ringing in my ears, a few months before he died, of my father saying “It looks like there is just not much hope.”
Alzheimer’s disease is slow, torturous, and dehumanizes individuals. My father’s experience was no different.
After he passed in 2022 we made donations to research, but that still felt unsatisfactory. When JHU Kuchibhotla Lab reached out to me in 2021, it was too coincidental. I had to take on the project.
Q: What was the task that Valere has to tackle?
Guy: Valere team of UI/UX designers was first tasked with working with JHU Kuchibhotla Lab’s team to design the application from scratch. This 6-week period included three meetings each week fleshing out detailed low-fidelity wireframes and flow diagrams, before making them into beautiful, intuitive colorful mockups.
After the project scope was then created, I assigned to the project the best developers and project manager from the Valere team. That team is still iterating on the application today.
The application facilitated “brain games” to patients, allowing researchers to compare the data from the patients’ biometrics in real-time with the brain games results — to ultimately produce new Alzheimer’s data that is pivotal to finding a cure for this disease. Additionally, caregivers could document how they observe the patient in terms of their alertness, etc.
Q: How did Valere work with the JHU researchers to help them create this app?
Guy: Valere deployed their dedicated team of developers to create an interactive and easy-to-navigate application. The team developed the application in Flutter and NodeJS while also specially designing a friendly User Interface that is ideal for Alzheimer patients and a research team.
This project was unique in that we initially had to understand the researchers’ needs so that the data would continuously be relevant. The Valere team maintained regular communication with the research team throughout the project and testing phase to ensure that we were up to date with the medical team’s research to ensure that the application is growing in tandem with their research.
Q: What was the result of this partnership?
Guy: The application was met with great success and was able to be seamlessly implemented into the Kuchibhotla Lab’s research. The application allowed the research team to record important data that is able to propel their Alzheimer’s research forward, even helping them receive further funding from Johns Hopkins University. As of today, Valere is continuing its partnership with Johns Hopkins university to add new features to the application in the years to come, to continue its research in developing a cure for Alzheimer’s.
The creators of the application from the Kuchibhotla Lab’s research team have agreed to dedicate the application in the name of my father, Gaetano John Pistone. I think if my father could see the work we are doing today with JHU he would be honored and humbled. That was the type of guy he was. He was all about doing the right thing, and that is what we are doing today with this application.
Valere is an award-winning software development agency that has built over 300 top-rated applications for startups and Fortune 500 companies in all verticals like healthcare, finance, sports, fitness, education, and more. Their apps have been featured by the New York Times, and have been consistently recognized as Apple App Store’s top featured apps, TechRadar, and Google Play Store’s top featured apps! Schedule a call with us today to learn how we can help your team create the perfect software or application that can Accelerate Your Business Goals!
In Summary
Valere helped doctors and scientists at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to design an application that allows Alzheimer’s patients to play “brain games” on a tablet or smartphone, all while bio-medical devices gather patients’ biometrics. The web service compares the data from the patient’s biometrics in real-time with the brain games results — to ultimately produce new Alzheimer’s data that is pivotal to finding a cure for this disease. The application is built in Flutter and NodeJS. Because of the success of the application, JHU has received further funding from the University and has partnered with Valere to continuously add new features to the application over the next few years.
