• WHAT IS DECI

    DECI captures and displays the three-dimensional electrical activity of the brain in real-time using conventional off-the-shelf electroencephalographic (EEG) equipment.

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  • REAL-TIME OUTPUT

    We make brain movies in real time and so the person under study can see his own brain thinking in real time.

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  • HOW DOES DECI WORK

    DECI goes beyond other imagining systems by visualizing the very rapidly changing electrical fields within the brain as brain movies. DECI is non-invasive and those having their brain scanned merely wear a soft electrode head-cap.

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  • WHY IS DECI UNIQUE

    Like other non-invasive neuroimaging modalities such as fMRI, creates both 2-D and 3-D still images of the brain. However, DECI goes beyond other imagining systems by visualizing the very rapidly changing electrical fields within the brain as brain movies. DECI is non-invasive and those having their brain scanned merely wear a soft electrode head-cap.

    Learn about DECI

About Tactile Health

An artificial intelligence and medical device company, focused on pain and touch diagnostics. Developers of “the woodpecker” a new programmable robotic device for testing pain and tactile disorders.

OUR MISSION: Our mission is to be the leader in providing diagnostic and monitoring products and services for Fibromyalgia and tactile sensation disorders. We believe that our research team has made a breakthrough in Fibromyalgia diagnosis by its application of machine learning/artificial intelligence techniques. This has enabled us to extract meaningful and important brain signals for pain that were hitherto impossible to find.

OUR VISION: Our vision is to leverage our understanding of the electrical activity of the brain and translate it into a full range of diagnostics and monitoring products and services for Fibromyalgia and Neuropathy.

OUR GOALS: Our main goal is to improve the ease, accuracy and speed of diagnosis, and in so doing to improve the clinical outcomes for Fibromyalgia and Neuropathy patients.

Key People

Dr. Mark Doidge, MD, Founder and CEO
Dr. Doidge is a medical doctor based in Toronto, Ontario. He is a former National Practice of Excellence award winner for physicians in Canada, given in recognition for starting an international relief organization: Canadian Physicians for Aid Relief. This organization brought assistance to 2.5 million people in 7 countries during his tenure. His many years of front line experience with patients convinced him of the necessity to design a new product that was affordable, non-invasive, and could objectively measure brain activity.

Mr. Mario Garingo, MA.Sc. – Lead Researcher and Programmer
Mr. Garingo is an electrical engineer with an BEng in Electrical Engineering and is working towards his Masters of Science degree from Ryerson University, for Biomedical Signal Processing. He is the lead developer for the Audio-Visual Project and The Tactile Health data Acquisition and Reporting Software.

Products and planned products

Woodpecker

The “Woodpecker” is our patented a multi-use, state of the art, programmable robotic arm. It was so-named because it was  designed to push back and forth repeatedly, like the movements of the head of a woodpecker. It was originally designed because of our teams belief that it should be possible to create and objective evoked potential test for Fibromyalgia, but no adequate device existed to deliver the stimulus. Later, additional functionality was added so that it could be used for subjective testing of mechanical pain and light touch thresholds. The latter is important for the accurate diagnosis of sensory loss due to many of the dozens of types of Neuropathy.

Here is a link to the granted patent for the Woodpecker:  It is entitled: “Apparatus and method for exerting force on a subject tissue.”

The Canadian patent can be viewed at: https://patents.google.com/patent/CA2806771C/de

The US patent can be viewed at: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8712512B2/en

For further technical details and uses for the Woodpecker, download the Woodpecker Spec Sheet.

Tactile Health believes that its pilot studies prove that it has the basis for the first objective test for Fibromyalgia. While the number of patients tested thus far is small, one of its studies involved over 600 single trial brain electricity reactions and it was 88% accurate. A smaller study of 10 patients was 95% accurate. We require additional capital to expand our study size, but we believe that this will lead to stronger validation. To our knowledge, no one has achieved results as good as those found in our pilot studies using a practical, commercializable, diagnostically objective, objective approach.

Planned remote machine learning analysis to provide Software as a Service (SaaS) to any facility that does the EEG/Evoked Potential recordings

In the near and intermediate future we see our main source of income as Software as a Service (SaaS) for the objective diagnosis of adult Fibromyalgia.  Tactile Health believes that this solution is practical, affordable and highly commercializable, and internationally scalable. It is also very safe.. Any EEG technician could be trained fairly easily by our team to perform the test. Such technicians already exist globally in developed countries.

After processing the patient’s EEG signals we will send a detailed report to the referring doctor and the EEG/evoked potential recording lab. (Evoked potential labs are found in hospitals around the world are the logical starting point because their staff are already trained to do similar EEG recordings.) Most private pain clinics in the world have many Fibromyalgia patients and so these clinics are expected to be major sources of patients for out test. Almost all Fibromyalgia patients sleep poorly and many get referred to sleep labs and so they too are expected to be referral sources and recording locations. (Most sleep labs do all night EEG recordings and so the technicians in such labs could be trained to add our test.) The type of EEG device that we use is fairly standard, easily purchased, already approved for use in developed countries and very affordable as compared to all other brain measuring devices such as functional MRI.

Our signal processing centre will issue a diagnostic report that contains the probability that the patient has or does not have Fibromyalgia. The referring physician, can, if they wish, use other clinical information available to them such as the ACR 2010 criteria for Fibromyalgia diagnosis, to further round out their understanding and diagnostic certainty.

Our reports will include graphs with what is known as “decision planes” which can show the patient’s position as compared other patients and normal controls. This provides perspective so that the patient and their health care provider can see how the patient compared to other Fibromyalgia patients and normal controls. Our test is more than a simple yes/no test because it is based on the presence of various families of electrical biomarkers. Over time we predict that these electrical biomarkers will be better understood and progressively useful in understanding the precise nature of the electrical abnormalities.

Our second major source of income is projected to be the sale or licencing a robotic arm, the Woodpecker.  It is not only essential for our SaaS but it can also be used to test sensory thresholds that are useful for the diagnosis of many peripheral Neuropathies including Diabetic Neuropathy.   Our research shows that it applies the stimulus more accurately and more consistently than the gold standard known as the 10 gram Semmes-Weinstien test. It has a major advantage over the Semmes-Weinstien because it can apply its tip in steps starting at forces much lower than 10 grams and this makes it possible to diagnose the Neuropathy at a much earlier stage.