About Clara
Dementia is the fastest growing major cause of disability globally. Its early stages are characterized by cognitive decline, therefore early detection is crucial for changing its trajectory.
The cognitive assessment tools available today do not identify dementia on time. They are expensive, inaccurate, and time consuming.
Now with Clara, cognitive decline can be easily detected at an early stage. Performing the test periodically can help doctors monitor their patients’ cognitive status and alert them when a patient's cognitive abilities have declined.
Clara is…
A Time-Saver
Clara saves valuable time for the doctor, as the patient can perform the test in the clinic waiting room, or even at your own home.
Developing
As Clara grows, its ability to provide doctors with more accurate classification scores is enhanced. Tell your friends about us and keep using Clara periodically to help us develop an efficient tool in the fight against dementia!
Secure
Clara is HIPAA compliant, the world's leading standard for information security and privacy. We use anonymized data to make the app smarter, but we will never sell, rent, or share your personal health information. Read more here.
The science behind Clara
The scientific foundation of Clara is the Orientation Neural Network - a network of brain areas that are activated together when we are thinking about our environment in relation to ourselves.
The cognitive faculty of orientation includes navigating in space, keeping track of events and recognizing people and social connections.
A decrease in orientation abilities is the core deficit of Alzheimer's disease - the most common form of dementia. Indeed, as recent research suggests, it is the Orientation Network that is mainly affected in Alzheimer’s disease.
Clara uses a simple task involving events, places, and people from one’s life, to assess the health of the Orientation Network in the brain.
Looking to dive deeper?
We have assembled a selected reading list for those interested in checking out the key peer-reviewed scientific papers we have published which support Clara’s scientific basis.
The team behind Clara
We are a group of neurologists, psychologists, physicists and computer scientists from the Computational Neuropsychiatry Lab at Hadassah Hebrew University Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel.
Led by Prof. Shahar Arzy, our goal is to create a freely available research tool which may advance our understanding of the neuropathological mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia on the one hand, and provide early diagnostic test scores for doctors and researchers on the other hand.
To learn more, please visit our lab website.