Belfast-based Cumulus Neuroscience has developed an in-home brain monitoring solution to support research on early Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease research has long relied on clinician-administered scoring assessments, such as the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale Cognitive Subscale (ADAS-Cog) and the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale. These tools provide infrequent snapshots of disease status, are prone to errors, and have limited sensitivity to the subtle, early-stage changes of the condition.
The NeuLogiq Platform combines a self-setup wireless dry-sensor EEG headset with tablet-based gamified neurocognitive assessments of cognition, mood, speech, and sleep, allowing frequent home-based capture of day-to-day symptom variation.
“The tools we rely on in Alzheimer’s trials were never designed to capture the small, day-to-day changes in cognition that matter most in early disease, and the cost and infrequency of clinic visits limit how often we can measure,” said Professor James Rowe, Professor of Cognitive Neurology at the University of Cambridge.
Results from the newly-published CNS-101 trial show people with Alzheimer’s disease find the NeuLogiq assessments easy to fit into their daily routines and not overly tiring. The study included 59 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease and 60 age-matched healthy controls. Participants were recruited from seven UK clinical sites. After a single in-clinic training session, participants in both groups were able to set up and use the EEG headset, and complete tablet-based assessments at home, without the assistance of medical staff or technicians.
Adherence to the assessment protocol was high in both groups – 88.8 per cent in controls and 77 per cent in the dementia group. Although participants with dementia reported lower confidence using the technology and encountered some minor technical challenges during initial home set-up, they completed 99.7 per cent of the sessions they started across the full 52 weeks.
The high adherence and positive usability ratings, sustained over 52 weeks, support the use of objective, frequent, home-based digital biomarkers spanning cognition, EEG and sleep to enable more sensitive, lower-burden Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials.
Professor Rowe, who is Principal Investigator of the CNS-101 trial, said: “What this study shows is that frequent, objective measurement of brain activity and cognition can be moved into the patient’s home – including those living with dementia – and can be sustained over a year with high adherence and real acceptability. Collecting data in a familiar environment, free of the stress and fatigue of lengthy clinic visits, is not only more comfortable for patients and families, it is a necessary step toward more sensitive, patient-friendly endpoints for the next generation of Alzheimer’s trials.”
“This study represents an important milestone for the NeuLogiq Platform and for the wider effort to bring more sensitive, real-world measurement to Alzheimer’s disease,” said Brian Murphy, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cumulus. “What stands out is that people living with mild dementia – not only healthy volunteers – were able and willing to use an EEG headset and complete cognitive tasks in their own homes, unsupervised, for a full year, finishing almost every session they began. That combination of high adherence and genuine patient acceptability in this population is an important foundation for designing trials that track disease progression more frequently and more precisely, while reducing the burden on patients and the cost and duration of studies.”
The CNS-101 trial results are published this week in Frontiers in Digital Health (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/digital-health/articles/10.3389/fdgth.2026.1840966/full).
The NeuLogiq platform and study design were shaped by the Cumulus Pharmaceutical Advisory Group, a consortium of 10 pharmaceutical companies – Biogen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, GSK, J&J Innovative Medicine, Merck, Pfizer, Roche and Takeda. The research was funded by Innovate UK.
