“L-DOPA is almost like a death sentence; if you have to start with medication, sooner or later you will have uncontrollable movement.”Yayoi Sakaki, Founder Project Ipsilon<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Project Ipsilon was born. Some biofeedback sensor devices, combined with a keyboard, that can test the cognitive capabilities of ADHD, dementia and Parkinson\u2019s patients. \u201cBoth ADHD and Parkinson\u2019s are dopamine-related diseases. If you have a lack of dopamine, your cognitive capabilities can be compromised.\u201d The system can measure impulse control, decision making, visual attention level and special orientation. \u201cWe have simplified music to let you know what key on the keyboard you need to press, as well as an instruction which finger you need to use to press down that key. Your brain responds naturally to that information. The actual movement of your finger shows if you are just guessing or actually understood the instruction. We correlate all that information to responses from sensors, and that materializes as an assessment of your cognitive functions.\u201d<\/p>\n The start-up is working together with several medical institutions and academic hospitals. \u201cA hospital in Italy is almost ready to start the clinical trial. Also, we have been in touch with the John Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine and hope to establish a new therapy using music to help regulate the dopamine level. We are still open for more clinical trials. The more data we have, the more precise diagnostics we can make.\u201d<\/p>\n Just like other founders of start-ups, Sakaki has high hopes for the future: \u201cMy hope for the future is that our device helps children with ADHD to reduce the intake of their medication. Because even though these medications are very heavily prescribed, no long-term effect studies have been done. Despite of the fact that similar chemical components are known for reducing grey matter of your brain, such type of medication is being prescribed. This may increase the likelihood of you developing dementia at an early age. Can you imagine the six million kids in the USA that take those medications could have dementia at 35 years old?\u201d<\/p>\n A lot of ideas are born when people see problems in our society; unfortunately, Project Ipsilon is no different in that manner: \u201cAn extended family member of mine passed away with Parkinson\u2019s. I saw that when you start with the medication L-DOPA, you have a high probability to develop uncontrollable movement called dyskinesia as side-effect after a few years. That is very devastating for people that get the disease. It is almost like a death sentence; if you have to start with medication, sooner or later you will have uncontrollable movement. That really affects who you are. We hope that this particular methodology for therapy, especially to regulate the dopamine level, will help ease some stigma of medication while the medicine catches up to find the actual cure for the Parkinson\u2019s disease.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the High Tech Campus, seven start-ups have been busy with the HighTechXL accelerator program for the last three months. They are on their way to the XL Day on 6 December, where they can win over future investors. E52 takes a glimpse into the crowd and works towards XL Day with portraits of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1632,"featured_media":521152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[4379,21845,827,8066,21681],"location":[],"article_type":[],"serie":[],"archives":[],"internal_archives":[],"reboot-archive":[],"class_list":["post-118939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sustainability-nl","tag-hightechxl-en","tag-project-ipsilon","tag-start-ups","tag-xl-day-en","tag-xlday17"],"blocksy_meta":[],"acf":{"subtitle":"","text_display_homepage":false},"author_meta":{"display_name":"Frans van Beveren","author_link":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/author\/frans-van-beveren\/"},"featured_img":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Project-Ipsilon-Logo-e1512058456488-300x293.png","coauthors":[],"tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["Sustainability<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Sustainability<\/span>"]},"tags":{"linked":["hightechxl<\/a>","Project Ipsilon<\/a>","start-ups<\/a>","XL Day<\/a>","XLDay17<\/a>"],"unlinked":["hightechxl<\/span>","Project Ipsilon<\/span>","start-ups<\/span>","XL Day<\/span>","XLDay17<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":"0","relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 8 years ago","modified":"Updated 8 years ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on November 30, 2017","modified":"Updated on November 30, 2017"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on November 30, 2017 5:15 pm","modified":"Updated on November 30, 2017 5:15 pm"},"featured_img_caption":"","series_order":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1632"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118939"},{"taxonomy":"location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/location?post=118939"},{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=118939"},{"taxonomy":"serie","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/serie?post=118939"},{"taxonomy":"archives","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/archives?post=118939"},{"taxonomy":"internal_archives","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/internal_archives?post=118939"},{"taxonomy":"reboot-archive","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/reboot-archive?post=118939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/archive.ioplus.nl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/mvp-testing-1_orig.png\")
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