Who we are

Innodem Neurosciences was founded by Dr. Etienne de Villers-Sidani in 2016. As a staff neurologist at the Montreal Neurological Hospital, he noticed that patients rendered speechless by various neurological conditions could not access effective communication tools. Communication with these patients is often only possible using gaze-tracking devices as eye movements are often spared in paralyzed individuals. The vast majority of gaze-tracking devices, however, require the use of expensive proprietary hardware and tend to be complicated to set up by family members or medical staff. This has resulted in very low use rates, poor quality of life, and poor quality of care for the vast majority of these patients. He imagined that a more intuitive mobile application could be developed since most patients and healthcare professionals today had access to smartphones and tablets with embedded cameras. Dr. de Villers-Sidani first hired software engineer Alexandre Drouin to build a software-based gaze-tracking prototype that would work on any mobile platform. He then paired with experienced entrepreneurs Marc Reeves and Yves Desgagné to help bring this technology to market. Pigio™ for iPad was launched in the summer of 2019 after receiving close to $1M in angel funding. Thanks to a fully integrated cloud-based deep-learning pipeline, the millions of data points derived from Pigio™ users led to a patented gaze-tracking technology using visible light cameras with a diagnostic grade precision similar or better than infrared solutions.

What we do

Today, Innodem works with the pharmaceutical industry, leading medical professionals, and artificial intelligence experts to develop and promote Eye Movement Biomarkers (EMBs) & Gaze Mapping Biomarkers (GMBs) as important clinical assessment tools in the field of neurology. It is building a series of disease-specific tests embodied in an intuitive App that captures EMB & GMB data. The vision is that over time, while leveraging the latest advances in machine and deep learning, this EMB/GMB platform will assist users to accurately diagnose and monitor neurological disorders affecting eye-movements or cognition such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheirmer’s, Parkinson’s or related disorders, Frontotemporal dementia, Cancer-related cognitive impairment (Chemo Brain) and many others.