Incubator

Dionysus Digital Health provides personalized, individual feedback on stress and wellness to improve workforce and personal success. Our technology creates a unique, multidimensional profile for each person and provides smart adaptive feedback, with actionable insights, to improve outcomes for all.

Optoceutics is developing cutting-edge technologies to help fight neurodegenerative diseases and mental health disorders. It was established in 2018 as a university spin-out based on a world patent from collaborative research at Danish Technical University (DTU) and University of California Berkeley (UCB) on the medical effects of masked light brain stimulation.

In particular, Optoceutics is investigating new approaches to Gamma brain wave stimulation for Alzheimer’s Disease. They are conducting a clinical study to investigate the potential effect of masked 40 Hz flickering light on Alzheimer’s disease patients. We are also collaborating on measuring masked light stimulation’s effects on major depression and anxiety disorders.

The 3 million bipolar sufferers have dramatically higher suicide and institutionalization rates, making it the costliest mental health disorder globally. Emozia joined our incubator as a startup building a platform for mobile phones that used passive data–gyroscope, ambient light, accelerometer, GPS, weather, power use, and more–to infer the emotional state of users. A side project emerged from this collaboration, pairing Emozia’s mobile platform with realtime data from bipolar sufferers to build a powerful model able to predict manic episodes up to a month in advance. The technology didn’t read your texts or your browser history–you just kept your phone in your pocket, and the app picked up trends throughout your day.

Not every idea we incubate comes from an external collaboration–sometimes Socos Labs incubates its own mad science projects. The Inclusion Impact Index is simultaneously a dataset, an algorithm, an economic model, and a website that focuses on revealing the impact of high-growth entrepreneurs from historically marginalized populations. The Index doesn’t just report the existing contributions of these entrepreneurs to their home cities, but what that impact could have been if the unique barriers they face were removed.

The purpose of the Index is to understand the broader impact of economic inclusion on the lives of everyone and create unique recommendations for cities on what they can change in order to turn that underutilized potential into a reality.

Another internal incubator project, Jitterbug was one of the world's first AI systems for diabetes. More meaningfully, it was born out of the Type I diabetes diagnosis of the founders' son. She hacked her son’s medical equipment and developed a novel machine learning algorithm to apply to the resulting medical data. Within a month this had grown into the “Jitterbug” system, which could predict low blood glucose events more than an hour into the future.

By changing her son’s treatment based on the algorithm, Dr. Ming found that her son spent 40% less time with too much sugar in his blood without any increase in dangerous low blood sugar episodes.

Also native to Socos Labs, Muse is an app and SMS system that uses machine learning to send targeted, play-based activities for parents and kids to engage with each day. There is no gamification, no study material, and no dashboards. Simply answer daily questions, record memories, and submit photos of artwork to teach Muse about you and your child. As it learns, Muse will provide a daily activity designed to improve your child’s productivity and well-being, integrated across their life.

Studies have shown that metacognition, general cognitive ability, socioemotional competency, creativity, and curiosity–the Muse curriculum–significantly affect life outcomes and produce happier, healthier, more productive lives. The goal of Muse is to extend existing educational initiatives into the home in order to drive positive socio-emotional and cognitive development throughout children’s lives.