WIMTACH partners with MindfulGarden Digital Health to improve the way delirium is managed

Delirium is a major factor in the overall wellbeing of a patient receiving care in a medical setting. The condition is considered a medical emergency, marking a severe change in mental state typified by confused thinking, a lack of awareness of one’s surroundings and often poor recovery outcomes for a patient. Significantly, when diagnosed early, delirium can often be reversed (unlike dementia which is progressive), but it takes early intervention and best practice management protocols to achieve this result.

Catherine Winckler, Founder and CEO of MindfulGarden Digital Health Inc., a Vancouver based healthcare technology startup, is acutely aware of how delirium can impact health outcomes. Her late mother’s misdiagnosed delirium and subsequent death led to a turning point in Winckler’s life. After witnessing first-hand, the impact of delirium on her mother, Catherine decided to pivot her career in digital entertainment towards developing a clinically validated non-pharmacological approach to the management of hospital acquired delirium by providing a tool of first reach to front-line caregivers that would lessen reliance on drugs and restraints. Today, MindfulGarden has been cleared as a Class 1 medical device, a digital ‘crash cart’ for hospital acquired delirium, a condition that can affect up to 70% of patients in the ICU and lead to 9X the risk of future cognitive decline including correlation with earlier onset of dementia.

At MindfulGarden Digital Health, the focus is to ‘Send patients home, brain healthy™’. This goal is shared in an ongoing partnership with WIMTACH to both enhance the MindfulGarden platform itself, and also to evaluate marketing reach into the Ontario area, which is an important target for the early-stage startup. The results of these two focus areas have helped to build momentum towards upcoming projects that will work within the product’s game-based environment, looking at the integration of sensor-based technologies and investigating areas of data collection, “It’s been a terrific partnership,” said Winckler. “The MindfulGarden team is excited by the potential of what we are forging with the WIMTACH group.”

The partnership has yielded positive results for the company since its first collaboration. This was demonstrated again in an applied research project centered on a strategic market research project to investigate market positioning in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area. WIMTACH has assisted the MindfulGarden team with securing funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Industrial Research Assistance program (IRAP) for applied research projects as well as bringing Centennial College students and faculty members with expertise to contribute to the development of these projects. It’s a factor of the partnership which Winckler found most enticing and instrumental in supporting her small team. “The government funding has been critical for us,” she explained.

Especially pleased with the work of Student Researcher Oluwafunto Oloyede, a student in Centennial College’s Marketing Research and Analytics program, Winckler noted that this work and the work of the rest of the team exceeded expectations. The Company has relied on WIMTACH to identify hospitals and key contacts who are involved in prioritizing delirium management in patient care management. The research work of the WIMTACH team helped Winckler’s team get a snapshot of current delirium reduction strategies of top 12 hospitals in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area with aims to eventually use that information to prepare for market entry initiatives in the Fall. “We now feel better prepared to take this invaluable research and start making our connections,” she said. “[This] research is actually going to help us to reach out to the right people to make our case for early-stage evaluations, saving us so much time on our go-to-market roadmap.”

For Winckler, another important feature of this partnership is that WIMTACH team is ready and eager to assist with any idea, from developing product cost calculators that will help assist hospitals with calculating the money they can save from integrating MindfulGarden into their patient care programming to potentially helping the company build a bespoke platform to replace third party software, thus adding valuable IP to the Company. “Can you imagine somebody being proactive and actually suggesting things as if [they’re] part of our team?” she said. “What I like about WIMTACH is that they are helping us solve very real and immediate problems that we are experiencing but also helping us identify opportunities around the corner.”

As a result of this confidence in the WIMTACH team, Winckler is enthusiastic about recommending the company to other startups. “WIMTACH is a really good place to consider as a research collaborator,” she said. “I would say to people that if you have research, technical, or any other product scaling opportunity, just talk to the people at WIMTACH to see if it’s within what they are doing because I think you would find that there is high caliber expertise and genuine enthusiasm there.”

Next on the horizon, the MindfulGarden team will be exploring how therapeutic sound frequencies can potentially calm patients with hypoactive delirium. WIMTACH is also discussing projects with the team that will add to the development of tools and features to further enhance the MindfulGarden platform.

For further information, please send press inquiries to ptyagi@centennialcollege.ca