Rick Morris Tackles Alzheimer's With Digital Health Startup

GaitIQ founder Rick Morris started his company to design software that is capable of identifying early signs of Alzheimer's by analyzing an individual's gait, according to the Rivard Report . Morris said proteins that appear as plaque in the brains of people with Alzheimer's begin manifesting in one's 30s, but few carriers are aware until symptoms appear and they receive a formal diagnosis, mainly due to the cost of diagnostic tests. He hopes GaitIQ's Alzheimer's screening can help ward off the disease for years and save people thousands of dollars in healthcare expenses. Morris says by measuring subtle shifts in a person's walking patterns early in Alzheimer's progression, "through early intervention we can definitely move the needle." Helping to build GaitIQ's underlying technology is Barbara Schnan Mastronardi, a systems engineer at the Geekdom startup incubator. Her expertise is in three-dimensional programming and modeling, and she has spent the past 12 months compiling data on gait movement to inform the algorithms that drive GaitIQ's Alzheimer's screening system. GaitIQ has been developing its technology for about two years with funding from a U.S. National Institute of Health grant.