How a technological founder uses AI to fight SLA

This is a test as told based on a conversation with Indu Navar, the CEO and founder of All. It was published for duration and clarity.

My husband and I were on the construction technology of the ground floor that changed the world.

I have diplomas in electrical engineering and computer science. I started my career at NASA and I was part of the founding team of what is the webmd today. Then I launched another company that I ran for 14 years. After that, I was investing and advised. I have always been fascinated by the megadonts and the more construction analyzes. My husband, Peter Cohen, worked on Amazon for about 18 years. He joined around 1996 or 1997 and built Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowd market.

Life was really beautiful. Here we make changes. He was still at the end of his forties, then he started to say: “Hey, I think something is wrong with my ankle. It is not a dorsal flexion.”

We say to ourselves: “Oh, no matter, it’s just an ankle problem.” No, it was a spine problem. Oh no, it was a brain problem. It took us two years to understand that it was actually the ALS, which is degenerative. The Diagnosis of SLA is called elimination, so you eliminate other diseases and problems. I think we spent more than $ 100,000 just to diagnose it.

Every 90 minutes, someone receives a SLA diagnosis and they hear the same diagnosis he heard 80 years ago. You are 2 to 5 years old to live from your first symptom. This is what shocked me. It takes a long time to be diagnosed, and we diagnose late in other diseases, such as cancer. Many people die without even being diagnosed.

Peter was diagnosed in 2018 and died in 2019. He shaken us. He rocked us in a way that, as entrepreneurs and as a problem solver, we ask how it is in such a disastrous state where we have not done something for 80 years? This problem is very opaque until you crossed it.

I started a non -profit organization in its name called the Peter Cohen Foundation. My goal is to be able to say that he helped heal SLA with what he experienced. We used to talk all the time what we would do differently if we knew that this problem existed before it happens to us.

Our goal with the Peter Cohen Foundation and everything is to bring technological innovations to ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases. We do everything, monitoring and evaluating what is happening in clinical trials and using sensors to predict what will happen. The sensors measure the speech of patients, breathing, walking and fine motor skills.

Today, we do not really have the tools to determine if the medication you give to a patient really works because the way he assesses your deterioration is to ask you: “On a scale of 1 to 4, how is your speech? How is your walk? How easy for you to cut your food?” For us, we are vegetarians. We don’t cut our food, so how will we know how to answer this? This is called a result declared by the patient, and a large part of the interrogation has not changed for years.

Using sensors, we don’t have to wait until you get to the point where you can’t do things. We can really predict where you are going to be in 3, 6, 9 or 12 months. We will use them for early diagnosis. We have digitized a lot and our algorithm is in clinical trials.

We call this research focused on citizens because we are going directly to patients and do research with people affected by the disease, so that we can involve thousands of people. We send them the sensors, they carry them and we monitor them remotely.

We have an application everything that allows patients to speak to other people who have ALS and who have crossed this trip. They can also speak to our LLM generative AI tool, but it’s not like talking to Chatgpt. Our AI is really classified and only trained with the data we have and the 220 hours of experts that spoke to us. It is a very reliable data set.

Currently, we are going to apply our process to our first other illness, which is Alzheimer’s disease. Huntington and Parkinson will also be in the near future. Our goal is to move the needle and fill the gap. We just had the impression that there was a need not satisfied with the way we care about people, and if you don’t care about people, you will never offer a remedy.