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Founder Story | Nuroflux

Introducing our third episode of our Founder Stories series featuring Nuroflux, which is the world’s first wearable to non-invasively monitor brain activity and blood flow alongside other vital activity relevant to stroke and stroke rehabilitation. Check out their story below! 

Transcript

[00:04 – 02:27] Sam van Bohemen 

When a family member suffered multiple strokes in between CT scans, we were desperate to understand why these strokes were not detected.

My name is Sam van Bohemen. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Nuroflux. We are developing
a wearable medical device for the continuous monitoring of stroke patients’ brain activity and brain blood flow.

Nuroflux was created from a PhD I’m currently completing in biomedical engineering at the University of Sydney. One of my PhD supervisors had an interesting idea for a novel method to continuously monitor changes in brain blood flow.

My research has been focused on investigating and validating this novel method for monitoring changes in brain blood flow. And now at Nuroflux, we are trying to commercialize this research to develop a wearable medical device to continuously monitor stroke patients and detect secondary strokes faster than current methods.

Following a suspected stroke, a patient will come into hospital with or have a CT scan to confirm the diagnosis. Now, CT scans provide an imaging snapshot in time, but due to radiation exposure are only performed every 24 hours In this first 24 hour window, patients will receive treatment and are now at risk of neurological deterioration, such as having a secondary stroke. However, there is currently no way to continuously monitor brain activity and brain blood flow continuously.

During my PhD, we have conducted a feasibility study to assess our proprietary technology. Our device was able to successfully monitor changes in brain activity and brain blood flow in healthy volunteers. And our technology had a highly significant correlation with the gold standard for short term brain blood flow monitoring.

We are now also conducting a clinical safety study at Westmead Hospital. The next study will involve a multi-center clinical trial to assess the efficacy of our device and we are really excited to conduct the study. Stroke is a second leading cause of death worldwide and is also a major cause of disability. In fact, worldwide there is a stroke every 2 seconds.

Our vision is to improve stroke patient outcomes by providing clinicians with real time quantitative insights into stroke, in Australia and worldwide.

Download a word version of the transcript here. 
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