In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare, Brainstem Digital Health is making waves with its innovative approach to data collection and decentralisation. By building on peaq, the go-to blockchain for real-world applications, as its digital backbone, Brainstem is leveraging the power of Web3 technology to create a sustainable and incentive-driven system that accelerates scientific research and enables personalised healthcare.
At the core of Brainstem’s mission is the belief that individuals should have full control and ownership over their health data. With the integration of peaq, Brainstem is taking a significant step towards achieving this goal. By utilising peaq as the underlying layer-1 network for its decentralised application, Brainstem is ensuring data authenticity and integrity while promoting privacy-first practices.
One of the key benefits of this integration is that it will enable the Brainstem community to monetize their health data through peaq’s instance of the Gaia-X data marketplace. This empowers individuals to participate in their health journey toward optimal health and reap tangible rewards for their data contributions.
By connecting wearable devices like the smartwatches many people already wear to the peaq mainnet and equipping individuals with unique peaq identifiers, Brainstem is creating a decentralised physical infrastructure network (DePIN) that gathers privacy-first health data.
The integration with peaq also brings additional advantages for Brainstem users. peaq’s ability to distribute a portion of network fees among owners of connected devices will provide an extra incentive for users to engage with the platform. Furthermore, the Brainstem DePIN will be linked to the EU-backed project Gaia-X, fostering collaboration between leading businesses, research institutes, and Web3 companies.
Till Wendler, co-founder of peaq, expressed excitement about Brainstem joining the peaq ecosystem, recognizing the value the collaboration brings to the community. The strategic fit between Brainstem and peaq and their shared focus on quality and privacy-compliant data sets the stage for a promising future in the AI revolution of health and wellness.
Brainstem Digital Health’s integration with peaq complements their ongoing commitment to revolutionising healthcare. By leveraging Web3 technology and empowering individuals to take control of their health data, Brainstem is paving the way for a more personalised and collaborative approach to healthcare. Join the Economy of Things and participate in the digital health revolution with Brainstem Digital Health and peaq.
Brainstem leverages wearable devices to screen for sleep apnea through the collection and analysis of wearable health data.
Sleep apnea affects between 10–25% of the global adult population and is associated with serious ailments such as hypertension, Type II diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Approximately eight million people in the UK suffer from the condition and this number is growing rapidly.
During sleep, cyclic periods in which breathing stops completely followed by a sudden arousal produces a well-defined pattern of alternating low and high heart rates. These episodes of breath cessation during sleep occur less frequently in minor cases of sleep apnea and occur more frequently in severe cases of sleep apnea. In order to diagnose the presence of sleep apnea and quantify the severity, patients must be referred for an overnight study to a sleep lab in a hospital or clinic. Sleep lab testing is inconvenient for the patient and costly for the health-care system and sleep study results require a timely review by a well-trained physician. Furthermore, the sleep study method of sleep apnea detection used currently makes it nearly impossible to track long-term changes in apnea episode count.
A new system needs to be developed that can enable ongoing sleep apnea episode tracking to either screen for increasing episode count in individuals at higher risk of developing sleep apnea or be used as a biomarker to optimise treatment regimes in those patients that already have a sleep apnea diagnosis. Most people with sleep apnea are unaware that they suffer from the disorder. Providing the general public with an affordable and practical method for sleep apnea screening could potentially be a game-changer in the strive towards a more preventative approach to healthcare.
Our goal at Brainstem Digital Health is to develop a wristband wearable device combined with a smartphone application for the remote and frequent screening of sleep apnea-related cyclic heart rate patterns. The device will possess high quality medical grade optical sensors for the detection of the pulse wave while the app will provide the user with visual representation of recent recordings as well as long-term data trends. Information regarding total time spent in cyclic heart rate pattern, total number of episodes, and number of episodes per hour will be presented to the user. A sleep hypnogram will also be presented that will demonstrate the association of the apnea-related cyclic heart rate episodes with deep and REM sleep stages.
Brainstem is a novel digital health data product for individuals who want to be more informed about their health and improve it. Brainstem aims to differentiate from existing, well known, device and app providers by enabling users to collect data continuously and share it in a secure way. In partnership with the Ocean foundation and Data Union, Brainstem leverages web 3 technologies including blockchain and cryptography in order to guarantee user privacy and data ownership while ensuring data security and integrity.
Brainstem leverages wearable devices to collect medical grade data, provide analytics and allow users to monetise their data.
Access to large quantities of data collected by consumer wearable devices has the potential to revolutionise the provision of healthcare and promote research that will lead to new discoveries which will improve health and wellbeing.
Brainstem Digital Health will support this revolution by providing a scalable, de-centralized platform that leverages accurate but inexpensive wearable devices to collect medical grade data, including: heart rate, heart rate variability, blood pressure, SpO2 and other health metrics that are in the process of being supported by rapid technological evolution of wearable devices.
In addition to a unique set of monitoring and therapeutic features within the Brainstem application, users will also be able to collect and publish their own data to an Ocean protocol powered Data Union in collaboration with DataUnion.app. Subscribers, including but not limited to medical researchers will, for example, be able to access data using compute-to-data methods that support AI modelling.
In order to provide economic incentives to promote data collection across a broad demographic, Brainstem will use tokens to reward participants who collect data and agree to publish it. The Brainstem mobile application will have an integrated wallet, allowing users to receive, store and exchange those rewards. Data consumers wanting to access data on a Data Union will be able to acquire tokens in order to do so. We expect this market to become increasingly sophisticated as the; range of participants, both publishers and subscribers, the range and depth of data and the methods by which the data is collected expands.
Inter wallet messaging will empower participants by providing ways to form dynamic collaborative teams to achieve specific data collection and related research goals. This feature will power a permissionless digital health web by supporting the development of applications which monitor ailments, track changes, and support therapy. This will in turn serve as the basis for future digital health centres.
Brainstem will initially focus on heart rate variability (HRV), a proxy for Autonomic Nervous System health and by association, the health and wellbeing of the brainstem itself. More than 50,000 research papers strongly suggest that better understanding of HRV has great potential to support the discovery of biomarkers for general health and wellbeing and offers the prospect of improved detection and in some cases management of disorders associated with mental health, cardio-vascular, neurodegeneration, sleep, and even Long Covid.
Feature and data access limitations of current wearable hardware, such as Apple and Fitbit, precludes an open platform on day one and Brainstem will provide an affordable wearable device that is optimised to collect and publish data across a range of conditions that are designed to yield new insights that will support future improvements in health and wellbeing.
“Brainstem seeks to redefine the way in which users interact with wearable technology in order to build the next generation of wearable health insights through the creation of the largest and highest quality wearable health data set available for all to leverage.” Max Campbell, Co-founder and CEO of Brainstem Digital Health
Medical research and health equity is limited by the costly, intermittent and labour intensive way in which health data is currently collected. Decentralised, DIY, large scale collection capability is likely to unlock a new generation of wearable insights and lead to new discoveries and associated improvements in health and wellbeing.
Brainstem and associated tools, will promote the alignment of incentives that is needed for open data collaboration. The Data Union will enable data providers to publish their data in an anonymised, GDPR compliant manner and receive both economic and social rewards, which will incentivise growth of the ecosystem. Open API’s coupled with the recycling of network revenues through a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) will help drive additional 3rd party software and hardware integrations, which we hope will drive a virtuous cycle of insight generation that will promote research and yield new discoveries.