Biogen Joins UCLA's mHealth Project to Gather Cognitive Data From Devices

An mHealth project launched in 2020 to track depression on Apple devices is expanding to measure mental health status, including cognitive decline.

The University of California at Los Angeles partnered with Apple last year to launch the three-year program through UCLA’s Depression Grand Challenge. The goal was to allow researchers to monitor participants for signs of stress, anxiety and depression through the Apple Watch and a wearable sleep monitoring device developed by Beddit, with data gathered by an app on the user’s iPhone.

“The analyses made possible by the scale, length and design of this study will provide the most extensive evidence available to date regarding the possible uses of digital tools for assessing and tracking behavioral health,” Nelson Freimer, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA and the study’s principal investigator, said at the time. “We envision a future in which these tools will become indispensable for depression sufferers and those providing them care.”

Now Biogen is joining the project. The Massachusetts-based Biotech company will reportedly analyze data from the iPhones and Apple Watches of more than 20,000 participants to looks for connections between smartphone use and physical activity and cognitive function.

Biogen and Apple had originally announced plans to collaborate this past January, but hadn’t yet settled on the UCLA partnership. At that time, their plans were to create a multi-year program that might help care providers spot early signs of conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and dementia.

“This is terrific news for all of us who are interested in our brain health,” George Vradenburg, co-founder and chairman of the non-profit UsAgainstAlzheimer’s, said in a January press release issued by Biogen. “Just as we today use new digital and mobile tools to help us monitor and improve our cardiovascular health, this new study will help us learn how to use those same tools to monitor and improve our brain health.”

“We have learned repeatedly that detecting disease at its earliest stage is our best bet to treat it effectively,” he added. “To that end, this exciting study could enable us to learn how to get early warning signs of cognitive decline which may be addressed through lifestyle and therapeutic changes designed to slow or stop the progression of brain disease.”

UCLA researchers say they hope to recruit as many as 3,000 participants for their program, giving Biogen and others more data to disseminate.

“Cognitive decline can be an early symptom of neurodegenerative diseases and dementia,” Biogen CEO Michel Vounatsos said in the January press release. “The successful development of digital biomarkers in brain health would help address the significant need to accelerate patient diagnoses and empower physicians and individuals to take timely action”

“For healthcare systems, such advancements in cognitive biomarkers from large-scale studies could contribute significantly to prevention and better population-based health outcomes, and lower costs to health systems,” he added. “Bringing together the best of neuroscience with the best of technology creates a wonderful prospect for patients and public health.”