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The BrainHealth Project Honored as a Finalist in Fast Company’s 2021 Innovation by Design Award

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Center for BrainHealth

The BrainHealth® Project, created by the Center for BrainHealth® with technology partner Dialexa, was named a finalist in Fast Company’s 2021 Innovation by Design Awards, in the Wellness category. This easy-to-use online platform delivers a unique, science-backed program to measure, improve and track one’s own brain fitness. It features the world’s first multidimensional measure of the brain’s performance, accompanied by online brain training and live virtual coaching, powered by data and machine learning.The personalized measures and training protocols of The BrainHealth Project are bringing precision brain health and a global health revolution one step closer to reality. People of any age and circumstance can take charge of their brain’s fitness, helping reduce toxic stress, increase productivity, extend peak brain years, strengthen social interactions and well-being, and potentially even stave off or mitigate the effects of a range of disorders, from PTSD to chemo-brain to Alzheimer’s.About the Award The Innovation by Design Awards honor companies solving the problems of today and tomorrow. The Wellness category includes consumer products, services, and environments using innovative design to promote a healthy lifestyle. This year, Fast Company’s judges included writers, editors, designers and business leaders. Entries were judged on functionality, originality, beauty, sustainability, user insight, and business and cultural impact.In addition to The BrainHealth Project, other honorees in the Wellness category include such brands as MIT Media Lab (category winner), Theragun, Nike, Fitbit, Samsung and Lululemon.
The BrainHealth Project
About The BrainHealth Project The BrainHealth Project is powered by a digital platform that marries two sciences with unstoppable potential: human learning and machine learning. It is both a scalable, long-term program for everyday people to maximize their brain fitness, and a research platform for the cognitive neuroscientists at the Center for BrainHealth and collaborators around the world. While “brain-training” games exist, The BrainHealth Project is unique in its multifaceted approach to brain health and fitness; its combination of self-directed content and live coaching; and its ability to incorporate new and personalized protocols gleaned from massive data analysis and machine learning.The Center for BrainHealth engaged Dialexa as a technology partner to create this platform, which opens the door to a lifetime journey of brain fitness. Participants set personal goals, learn healthy brain practices, engage in exercises to reinforce new habits, get guidance from a trained BrainHealth coach, and check progress periodically with an assessment-based measure called the BrainHealth Index.Scott Harper, CEO of Dialexa said, “The Dialexa product team, alongside the BrainHealth clinicians and development team, leveraged design psychology and communication theory to craft a motivating and rewarding product experience that is key to keeping engagement high and optimizing the results of the study. Combine that with the latest in machine learning and AI and you have something magical that drives true behavioral change. The impact of this program could be a game charger in solving some of the world’s most critical brain health issues.”Thanks to the Project’s proprietary machine learning algorithm, researchers have been able to collect and assess data in real time, and then use it to enhance protocols for brain fitness improvement. This combination of the online participant interface and machine learning allow the Project to scale up. The platform will gather and analyze longitudinal data from tens of thousands of participants as the project continues to grow. Anonymized, aggregate data from the Project is openly available to researchers across the world who can use it to advance the science of enhancing, protecting and restoring the brain.The BrainHealth Project leverages nearly three decades of research led by Sandra Bond Chapman, PhD, Distinguished Professor and Chief Director of the Center for BrainHealth. It digitizes and streamlines BrainHealth’s proprietary brain health measure (the BrainHealth Index) and evidence-based brain training protocol, administered by trained BrainHealth coaches.Participants start by taking a battery of assessments, which include questionnaires and game-like activities that measure three key factors of brain health: clarity (innovation, reasoning, optimism, compassion), resilience (social support, purpose) and fortitude (emotional balance). Then they meet virtually with their BrainHealth coach to get feedback on the results, which are recorded as their BrainHealth Index. Once personal goals are set, participants engage with a variety of content delivered through the platform to build their brain fitness. They are encouraged along the way with tips, nudges and streaks. Progress is stored on their personalized, password-protected dashboard.“Our team has set an audacious goal of launching the next health revolution, focused on extending peak brain years,” said Dr. Chapman. “It would simply be impossible without an online platform that is both easy for all ages and tremendously engaging for participants from all walks of life, as well as technically sophisticated to enable a personalized experience at population scale.”For more information, visit:
  • The BrainHealth Project
  • Fast Company's 2021 Innovation by Design Award
CONTACT Stephanie Hoefken 972.883.3221 stephanie.hoefken@utdallas.eduABOUT CENTER FOR BRAINHEALTH Center for BrainHealth®, part of The University of Texas at Dallas, is a translational research institute committed to enhancing, preserving, and restoring brain health across the lifespan. Major research areas include the use of functional and structural neuroimaging techniques to better understand the neurobiology supporting cognition and emotion in health and disease. This leading-edge scientific exploration is translated quickly into practical innovations to improve how people think, work and live, empowering people of all ages to unlock their brain potential. Translational innovations build on Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactics (SMART™), a proprietary methodology developed and tested by BrainHealth researchers and other teams over three decades.ABOUT DIALEXA Dialexa is a strategic consulting and product development firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas on a mission to “make every company a great technology company.” Driven by research and backed by purposeful design, Dialexa creates cutting edge technology products and business solutions that transform industries and ultimately, change lives. Dialexa has received numerous awards, such as Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces, Great Place to Work, SMU 100, and was named by Entrepreneur.com as one of the top entrepreneurial companies in America.

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Sandra Bond Chapman, PhD

Chief Director Dee Wyly Distinguished Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences Co-Leader, The BrainHealth Project

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