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Researchers at ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ are working with alumni startup Connectome to bring brain health monitoring to consumers.

People are increasingly interested in measuring their health, from the number of steps they take each day to their blood sugar levels and the quality of their sleep. These consumer health or wellness measurements usually stop short of the brain, but , a startup cofounded by Imperial alumnus Dr Rufus Mitchell-Heggs, plans to change that. 

We aim to make routine brain health a reality, taking the latest methods from the lab, whether that is neuroimaging or functional analysis techniques, marrying them together in one platform that we can then market to different consumers. Dr Rufus Mitchell-Heggs Connectome

It has developed a system that analyses oxygen levels in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain used to solve problems, make plans and manage emotions. By matching these measurements with routine information from fitness trackers, it is building a body of knowledge that will help people make lifestyle decisions that support healthier brain function.

Formed in 2024, Connectome recently raised $2 million in pre-seed investment. It will launch its platform for consumers in July and begin a project with an Italian football club, Como 1907, to measure brain oxygenation during pre-season training and injury time once the season begins. 

Dr Mitchell-Heggs carried out his PhD in Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering under the joint supervision of , director of the Centre for Neurotechnology, and Professor Richard Morris at the University of Edinburgh.

“My PhD involved analysing different brain states over time, in healthy and disease states, and trying to understand the best way to characterise and represent this information,” he recalls. “We were doing that in a basic neuroscience sense, trying to understand the mechanism, but we also started to think: is there a real-world version of this that exists for functional neuroscience?”

After his PhD, he took up this question with Lucas Scherdel, whose background combines health policy, innovation and medical technology in both the public and private sectors. Together they founded Connectome Health, with Mr Scherdel as chief executive and Dr Mitchell-Heggs as chief scientific officer.

“What the company aims to do is make routine brain health a reality, taking the latest methods from the lab, whether that is neuroimaging or functional analysis techniques, then marrying them together in one platform that we can then market to different consumers,” Dr Mitchell-Heggs says. 

Those consumers might be athletes training for faster reaction times, or people interested in improving their functional longevity. With further work, it might also be people managing conditions such as dementia or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) below clinical thresholds.

Shining a light on the brain

The technique they chose to start with is time-domain functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Pulses of light are sent through the skull and onto the outer surface of the brain, where they scatter on contact with haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying substance in blood. By measuring the scattered light, it is possible to tell just how much oxygen is reaching the brain.

“There are some amazing techniques that are incredibly informative about the brain, but they are not very intuitive for the consumer,” says Dr Mitchell-Heggs. “This is an easily explainable measurement that we can share with people.” 

To characterise the system further, Dr Mitchell-Heggs came back to his old supervisor at Imperial, and together they set out to establish a baseline in healthy individuals. One hundred volunteers aged 18 to 55 were asked to undergo brain scans while carrying out cognitive flexibility and memory tests, and also to share data from their wearable health devices.

“The aim was to build an understanding how their lifestyles are impacting their brains,” says Dr Mitchell-Heggs. “For example, from that cohort we can understand how things like age impact their brains, but also things like sleep or activity habits.”

This study, which was funded by a UKRI grant, concluded in June and has just been released as a pre-print paper, which means it has yet to be peer-reviewed. The next step will be to collect similar data from people with other conditions, beginning with people with untreated ADHD.

Meanwhile, Master’s ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ in Professor Schultz’s group, and a post-doctoral researcher, will further analyse the healthy cohort data to see what other insights it can provide, and how such measurements might help consumers. 

This is a way for us to translate work that is otherwise for an obscure neuroscience audience to applications that are of real use and value. Professor Simon Schultz Department of Bioengineering

“Clinical uses take much longer to establish, so we are proving ourselves in the wellness space, where we hope to build a sustainable business model, working hand-in-hand with the academic world to translating the latest insights,” says Dr Mitchell-Heggs.

The advantage of doing this with functional near-infrared spectroscopy is that the technique is scalable. “This gives you information that is nearly as good as fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging], but it is much less expensive and time-consuming, and you don’t need to bring the patient into the clinic,” says Professor Schultz. “That means we can do a lot more scans per person, and cover a lot more people.” 

As the data starts to flow, AI-enabled analysis can start to understand the relationship between the brain measurements and all the other health and lifestyle indicators available. “It’s a virtuous circle. The more people we see, the more we can say about the people.”

This work draws on data analysis techniques developed in Professor Schultz’s lab for fundamental research, which read across remarkably well to the results from these simpler brain monitors. “For us, it’s a way to translate work that is otherwise for an obscure neuroscience audience to applications that are of real use and value,” he says.