The Center for BrainHealth, a leading research institution dedicated to advancing the field of neuroscience, faced operational hurdles to expand and reach its vision.

Their flagship initiative, The BrainHealth Project®, involved managing a decade-long longitudinal study with a goal of over 100 thousand participants. The original intake process required lengthy three-hour sessions, manual processes, and high-touch environments—a logistically demanding approach that limited its ability to scale. In addition, the center urgently required innovative technological intervention capable of scaling operations efficiently without compromising scientific rigor, as participant retention was key to ensuring comprehensive analysis capabilities.

These challenges called for a sophisticated, yet accessible tool designed to facilitate remote participation and streamline data management.

The Center for BrainHealth approached Dialexa®, an IBM Company, as a key product and technology development partner to help the company expand its research capacity. In addition to scalability, keeping existing participants engaged for the duration of the study remained paramount.

The Dialexa digital product engineering and consulting team worked closely with customers to do a deep qualitative and quantitative research and interviews to help develop a baseline vision. The team then used Design Thinking processes and workshops to build the customer journey, which was hosted in the AWS Cloud platform.

Together, both companies collaborated to design and build a rich interactive user experience for a personalized The BrainHealth Project® data platform and portal. This solution allowed participants to enroll in the research program to take assessments, consume digital product offerings, and receive personalized recommendations and reports. Using an interdisciplinary team of engineers, UX professionals, and machine learning experts, a foundational data platform with a modern interface was created—making it entirely more functional in the face of today’s challenges. The platform then evolved to become a participant-friendly portal, which provided a personalized user journey that sent and received information, tracked progress, and deployed various metrics that helped track brain health and keep participants deeply engaged.

The Dialexa team worked closely with statisticians from Center for BrainHealth to create machine learning powered algorithms for the initial assessments and decreasing time and effort needed to onboard new participants. Since the focus of the project is to explore the brain’s limitless potential, the cognitive neuroscience research provided a better understanding of how to tap into its ability to adapt and improve across a lifetime.

With the data collected, the team developed and tested a series of science-based brain training tactics and techniques, including a proprietary holistic measure of the brain’s health and performance: The BrainHealth Index.

The new digital data platform allowed the formerly in-person research process to grow and expand beyond the Dallas/Fort Worth region.

Working closely with the Center for BrainHealth statisticians, Dialexa was able to utilize custom algorithms to perform the initial assessments and decrease the time and effort needed to onboard new participants. The results included:

• 90% workload reduction: Digitalizing and automating the workflow created tremendous efficiency and productivity gains.
  
  
• 1st Brainhealth Index: Developed the first algorithm to measure and quantify a person’s current level of brain health and performance, as well as track improvement over time.
  
  
• Over 35 thousand participants to date: The program has onboarded thousands of participants from 65 countries since the launch of the new digital platform.
  
  
• Expanded reach and commercialization: The platform, data, and algorithm are available for corporate wellness programs, research facilities, and for new commercial ventures.

Dialexa’s work on the BrainHealth Project was recognized in ways never imagined. Not only was it highly praised by the Center for BrainHealth, but it was also selected as a finalist for Fast Company’s 2021 Innovation by Design award.

Center for BrainHealth (link resides outside of ibm.com)—part of The University of Texas at Dallas—is a nonprofit research institute redefining how people understand and address the brain’s health and performance. It conducts leading-edge research and creates science-backed programs that empower people to be more proactive about their own brain health.