Imperial College London is working with Connectome Health to take brain monitoring technology into the consumer wellness market.
The work aims to move brain health tracking beyond laboratories and clinics, using wearable-style technology to show how lifestyle may affect brain function.
Connectome Health, co-founded by Imperial alumnus Dr Rufus Mitchell-Heggs, has developed a system that analyses oxygen levels in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in planning, problem-solving and emotional control.
The company combines those readings with routine data from fitness trackers, including sleep and activity, to build evidence on how daily habits may be linked to healthier brain function.
The startup was formed in 2024 and recently raised US$2m in pre-seed investment. It will launch its consumer platform in July and begin a project with Italian football club Como 1907 to measure brain oxygenation during pre-season training and injury time once the season begins.
Dr Mitchell-Heggs completed his PhD in Imperial’s department of bioengineering under the joint supervision of Professor Simon Schultz, director of the Centre for Neurotechnology, and Professor Richard Morris at the University of Edinburgh.
Dr Mitchell-Heggs said: “My PhD involved analysing different brain states over time, in healthy and disease states, and trying to understand the best way to characterise and represent this information.
“We were doing that in a basic neuroscience sense, trying to understand the mechanism, but we also started to think: is there a real-world version of this that exists for functional neuroscience?”
After his PhD, Dr Mitchell-Heggs developed the idea with Lucas Scherdel, whose background spans health policy, innovation and medical technology across the public and private sectors.
The pair founded Connectome Health, with Scherdel as chief executive and Dr Mitchell-Heggs as chief scientific officer.
“What the company aims to do is make routine brain health a reality, taking the latest methods from the lab, whether that is neuroimaging or functional analysis techniques, then marrying them together in one platform that we can then market to different consumers,” Dr Mitchell-Heggs said.
The company says potential users could include athletes training for faster reaction times, as well as people interested in improving their functional longevity.
With further work, it says the technology could also be explored for people managing conditions such as dementia or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, known as ADHD, below clinical thresholds.
The system uses time-domain functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, a technique that sends pulses of light through the skull to the outer surface of the brain.
The light scatters when it reaches haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying substance in blood, allowing the system to estimate how much oxygen is reaching the brain.
“There are some amazing techniques that are incredibly informative about the brain, but they are not very intuitive for the consumer,” said Dr Mitchell-Heggs.
“This is an easily explainable measurement that we can share with people.”
To further characterise the system, Dr Mitchell-Heggs returned to his former supervisor at Imperial to establish a baseline in healthy individuals.
One hundred volunteers aged 18 to 55 underwent brain scans while completing cognitive flexibility and memory tests. They also shared data from wearable health devices.
“The aim was to build an understanding how their lifestyles are impacting their brains,” said Dr Mitchell-Heggs.
“For example, from that cohort we can understand how things like age impact their brains, but also things like sleep or activity habits.”
The study, funded by a UKRI grant, concluded in June and has been released as a pre-print paper, meaning it has not yet been peer reviewed.
The next step will be to collect similar data from people with other conditions, beginning with people with untreated ADHD.
Master’s students in Professor Schultz’s group, alongside a post-doctoral researcher, will further analyse the healthy cohort data to assess what other insights it could provide and how the measurements might help consumers.
“Clinical uses take much longer to establish, so we are proving ourselves in the wellness space, where we hope to build a sustainable business model, working hand-in-hand with the academic world to translating the latest insights,” said Dr Mitchell-Heggs.
Professor Schultz said functional near-infrared spectroscopy could be more scalable than some established brain imaging techniques.
“This gives you information that is nearly as good as fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging], but it is much less expensive and time-consuming, and you don’t need to bring the patient into the clinic,” he said.
“That means we can do a lot more scans per person, and cover a lot more people.”
Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, is a scan that measures changes in blood flow in the brain to show which areas are more active.
As the data starts to flow, AI-enabled analysis can begin to explore the relationship between brain measurements and wider health and lifestyle indicators.
“It’s a virtuous circle. The more people we see, the more we can say about the people.”
Professor Schultz said the work draws on data analysis techniques developed in his lab for fundamental research, which can also be applied to simpler brain monitoring tools.
“For us, it’s a way to translate work that is otherwise for an obscure neuroscience audience to applications that are of real use and value,” he said.
