Learning Your Limits with Dr. Ashleigh Kennedy
Show Notes:
In today’s episode, Bella talks to the founder and CEO of Neurovine, Dr. Ashleigh Kennedy. From her own experience as an elite athlete, and as the daughter of a pro-football player, Ashleigh has had first-hand experience with post concussion syndrome and the lack of information that is readily available to clinicians and patients alike. In 2019, she and her husband founded Neurovine, which aims to empower concussion patients by measuring brain health and optimizing their recovery process. From the initial idea of tracking patient recovery data, Neurovine has grown into a powerful tool that has applications to the recovery process across a variety of traumatic brain injuries.
Tune in to hear Bella’s experience with the EEG headband that is used to make the brain injury visible to clinicians and patients, and how combining activity tracking with an app can prevent you from over-exerting yourself during recovery. We discuss the importance of addressing mental health in post concussion recovery, and how Neurovine will help make general practitioners the quarterbacks of the recovery process. Hear how to join ongoing clinical trials and so much more in this informative episode!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Welcome to today's guest, Dr. Ashleigh Kennedy, CEO and founder of Neurovine.
• Ashleigh’s personal experience of post concussion syndrome and why she decided to work in this field.
• Why Neurovine was founded.
• The importance of providing the latest research to clinicians as well as patients.
• Parallels between post concussion syndrome and the game of snakes and ladders.
• Making the brain injury visible using an EEG headband.
• Why it’s important to stop exerting yourself before you reach fatigue, and how Neurovine helps with this.
• How you can join the ongoing Neurovine clinical trials in Ontario.
• Translating the Neurovine tools beyond post concussion syndrome: How Ashleigh’s work can help support recovery across other traumatic brain injuries.
• Why mental health is part of Neurovine, and how addressing it can positively affect your post concussion recovery.
• Equipping the clinical community to understand the root causes of post concussion syndrome.
• How tracking your data can help you handle your recovery.
Check Out Neurovine:
Check out Neurovine and the EEG headband here!
Connect with Neurovine on social media with the links below:
Follow Post Concussion Inc on Social Media to stay up to date on the podcast
Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:05.3] BP: Hi, I’m your host, Bella Paige and welcome to The Post Concussion Podcast. All about life after experiencing a concussion. Help us make the invisible injury become visible.
The Post Concussion Podcast is strictly an information podcast about concussions and post-concussion syndrome. It does not provide nor substitute for professional medical advice diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The opinions expressed in this podcast are simply intended to spark discussion about concussion and post-concussion syndrome.
Welcome to today’s episode of The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Dr. Ashleigh Kennedy. Ashleigh is the CEO and cofounder of Neurovine. She is an NCAA, all-American with PhD’s in human kinetics and exercise physiology and a post-doctoral fellowship in neuroscience.
Before founding Neurovine, Ashleigh ran a successful consulting company that validated new innovations for health technology startups and large medical institutions.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:34.1] BP: Welcome to the show Dr. Ashleigh.
[0:01:36.1] AK: Thanks for having me, this is great.
[0:01:38.0] BP: Do you want to tell everyone about why you got into concussion research and concussions in general?
[0:01:43.2] AK: Yeah, for sure. When I was growing up, my dad was just ending his football career. He played professional football in Canada and we really were close to some of his friends that suffered pretty seriously from post-concussion syndrome. Whether or not they knew it at the time is unclear but he lost a friend to suicide when I was quite young and that really shaped me as a person and pursued me to study neuroscience and to really understand what happens after repetitive concussions and how can we improve that.
[0:02:20.2] BP: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Something I find a lot with concussion work is, most people are driven by something whether they grew up with it, they had something happen to themselves but it doesn’t seem like something people just get interested in. There’s always like a story to it, which I always think is really important because it kind of gives you an extra drive to helping the concussion survivors get better. What is Neurovine all about and when did you start it?
[0:02:48.2] AK: It’s almost three years old, we started in February of 2019. A lot of what we’re doing is based on what I learned through my education but the company was founded in February of 2019, my co-founder is my husband who is a family medicine physician. He’s got quite a few concussion patients in his practice and he was really frustrated that he just didn’t have the tools he needed to support them through their recovery process. He felt diagnosis was fairly clear but really, the recovery was this journey that it’s kind of like snakes and ladders progression as recovery, where you don’t really know what’s helping or hindering our recovery process and so we thought, let’s just build a small application to fill that gap.
I was just leaving this consulting practice that I had, we felt we were well equipped to start building some technology and the space. Initially, it was supposed to be a small application but over the past two and a half years, it’s grown into really a therapeutic intervention. A platform that’s designed to not only make the injury visible for patients but to give physicians the data that they need to make informed decisions to support their patients overtime. But at the core of what we do it’s patient centric. It’s designed to get the patient back on their feet, address the underlying root causes of their symptoms and provide therapeutic intervention that can support proper healing.
[0:04:27.1] BP: I think it’s also great and I also do love that you do help other physicians because I think it’s really important that everyone stays up to date because we all know that the research is changing frequently and we’re actually starting to know more than we did last year or five years ago or 10 and it’s important to stay up to date because a lot of physicians aren’t able to because there are so many things to stay up to date with that can be overwhelming for sure.
I think that’s great and I like your snakes and ladders. I’ve never thought about it that way but it’s definitely a good analogy of how recovery is no straight line and it’s hard to pinpoint what’s causing what and why things are happening or why sometimes we are doing so much better and then all of a sudden, we’re not the next day. And it’s really hard for patients, especially mentally to handle those ups and downs of recovery. Neurovine has a special concussion program that you guys are working on. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that?
[0:05:29.2] AK: Yeah, definitely. Like I said, we were going to just create a small little application that could be used by patients to get back to work after their concussion. The core really was to get people cognitively active and physically active because we know that’s important for recovery but to prevent them from overexerting themselves physically and cognitively.
That’s kind of the core feature that we began with but you know, as we started working with clinics, physiotherapy clinics across Ontario and Quebec, we started learning that there was a very invisible area of the recovery process and that was these physiotherapists would develop a rehabilitation program to treat the symptoms but they were having a hard time getting underneath.
Understanding what was causing the symptoms and so with our technology that we created, both the software application and the hardware component, we’re able to data mine, to really get to the root of what’s causing these symptoms. Maybe I’ll just talk about the headbands a little bit and then kind of the therapies that we’re developing.
The headband is, it’s an EEG headband and it can measure brain activity. It can measure heart rate and your balance and patients wear this technology while they’re doing their recovery therapy or while they’re doing work or being physically active. And the technology gives the patient instant feedback on how well they’re doing with their therapeutic intervention.
They’re doing balance training, you can get instant feedback on what you're doing well and what you can improve on. Similarly, if you're doing eye tracking or vision training, we can give you feedback on what’s going well and what’s not going well.
Those are kind of features in this platform that we’ve developed but everything revolves around the patient wearing the headband and following the training program on their cellphone. And all of these data is then shared with the clinician or clinicians who are treating the patient.
[0:07:34.2] BP: Yeah, I actually got to try the headband and the app out with Andrea when she was here. I thought it was really interesting because it’s important to recognize like we talked a lot with Andrea, I talked a lot about the cognitive brain that you’re not realizing that that’s exhausting too. Yes, you actually did work all day because you were using your brain all day.
Yes, okay, you weren’t being physically active but your brain is still tired, so it was really interesting to watch as we test it through the app. There’s lots of different settings, you guys are in clinical trial at the moment, correct?
[0:08:17.0] AK: We are, yes. Yeah, we’re in the clinical trial with that first feature that you tried out and that feature is really — it revolves around empowering patients to be cognitively active to do their homework or to go back to work but again, warning them, before they get into that red zone or that zone of overexertion.
That’s the first feature that’s being tested in clinical trials with concussion patients. Those trials are running at physiotherapy clinics across Ontario. So if you’re interested, you can get in contact with me or with your physiotherapist and they can connect with us but we’re working with physiotherapy clinics because it’s so important to have the clinician involved in anything that you use in a recovery process.
[0:09:03.0] BP: For sure, and be able to assess what does this mean?
[0:09:07.0] AK: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, actually, the physiotherapist can move you along this graduated return back to work so as your brain heals and your capacity increases, your physio or your physician can kind of move you up to the next level so you can work harder and longer, while still getting that warning before you over exert.
[0:09:28.0] BP: Yeah, for sure. I found, it was really interesting, I never really thought of warning myself before I push over the limit, that’s something that took me years to actually learn and it would have been nice to learn it right away where I would have known.
Sometimes even when I’m working, I worked yesterday and I’d get to that point where I’m not really thinking. I’ve been staring at the same screen for so long, I haven’t progressed at all in the last hour and then I go, “Okay, I should really take a break because my brain needs a break” but what this technology does is it is supposed to tell you and it is working on telling you before you get to that point, before you — that, “Oh wow, I pushed it too far” kind of.
[0:10:10.0] AK: Yeah, exactly. The worst thing is to have that hangover for the next day or the next week when you are trying to get back on your feet and that’s what causes the anxiety of like, “Oh never mind, I can’t work because I worked yesterday and look at how I feel today” so if we can empower patients to take little chunks, your confidence grows and your ability to push yourself knowing that you are going to have a warning.
[0:10:32.0] BP: Yeah, for sure. I really like the hangover thing. I never thought about it that way but it’s really what it feels like and we always talk on the podcast how sometimes things are worth the hangover I guess as you call it and some things aren’t. Some days you decide to push yourself and go out all day. Well, okay but Monday is going to be a rough day because Saturday and Sunday we’re overly busy and if we could warn ourselves before getting that tired, maybe we could go for a 15 minute, 20 minute nap and then kind of restart and see how you feel.
Everyone, you can find more out about Neurovine and their work at neurovine.ai, that’s neurovine.ai, which will also be found in our shownotes and episode description but with that, we’re going to take a short break.
[BREAK]
[0:11:25.8] BP: I just wanted to say thank you. The podcast is just over six months old and I couldn’t be happier with the response. If you truly love the podcast, please consider leaving a tip in our support the podcast tip jar found at the bottom of our episode description. All tips are greatly appreciated and help cover cost of the show.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:11:51.1] BP: Welcome back to The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Dr. Ashleigh Kennedy. Something I wanted to ask was, how can this technology help others? Will it expand past concussion patients? Is that your only focus? What are you thinking with all of that?
[0:12:09.0] AK: Yeah, so the components of what we’ve created translate beyond concussion regardless of what is causing your injury, what remains true is that the injury is invisible, so whether it’s concussion, whether it’s a stroke and even looking at things like early-stage dementia, all of these ailments are invisible to the patient, to the caregivers who are supporting the patient and largely, to the clinicians as well.
If we can make brain health visible and tangible and provide engaging therapies that can support recovery, then the technology can translate beyond concussion quite easily. My training is in stroke recovery and concussion recovery. There is some really exciting research showing the importance of intense physical activity post-stroke, so if we can support that intense physical and cognitive activity, adding components of gamification and competition, we can really improve the trajectory of recovery after a stroke. Yeah, we’re excited about those other opportunities but I think at the core of what we do is mental health.
[0:13:22.9] BP: Yes.
[0:13:24.1] AK: Mental health is such an important predictor of how well somebody recovers and so we’re working hard to develop features that can support mental health, whether that’s connecting patients with therapists in their area, supporting virtual therapy and introducing things like mindfulness and meditation. If you go to our website, we’ve got a series of free meditations that are designed specifically for our concussion patients.
You can go through those and they are tailored to different things that you are maybe struggling with, whether it is mental health or just fatigue or you are not sleeping, we’ve got meditations designed to support you in those areas.
[0:14:03.0] BP: Yeah, I think that is also great as we always talk that concussions, brain injuries including strokes, a lot of the time the symptoms in the end, end up very similar not initially a lot of the time like strokes, traumatic brain injury survivors deal with things that are more severe at the beginning but after a few years, a lot of the time we’re all dealing with the same symptoms and the same troubles and it is a very integrated community for sure.
That’s why I think it’s important because a lot of our listeners are traumatic brain injury survivors, stroke survivors because it is all connected because you are all dealing with the same thing. I also really like the mental health piece, that’s something we focus a lot on, on the podcast because it was really missed in my recovery when I was dealing with my concussion recovery.
I always call it the last piece of my puzzle because I didn’t really get headaches anymore, everything was going better but my mental health after eight years at that time, seven years of struggling hadn’t been really addressed enough. I had done the odd therapy session. It had been mentioned but that was it and going into therapy and getting help for that and learning mindfulness and all of those things is what kind of completed my puzzle.
Where I was like, “Wow okay, I can be happy now and enjoy my life” and I think if it had been started a lot earlier on, it would have helped significantly throughout my whole entire recovery.
[0:15:31.1] AK: Yeah, absolutely and I think that’s a piece that is often missed, whether it’s physiotherapy or you know, your family physician treating you, they are so used to treating the body.
[0:15:43.5] BP: Yeah.
[0:15:44.3] AK: That sometimes the mind in terms of mental health does get left and it is the last piece to be addressed. I think you could improve the healing of the body if you addressed the mind right away.
[0:15:55.1] BP: Yeah, for sure. I definitely agree. Talking about all of this technology, it is an EEG headband, which is super fascinating, I really like testing it out and seeing it. What is the future plan for all of this? Are you going to keep working on the headband? Do you have other ideas? What’s the plan?
[0:16:14.2] AK: Yeah, so the headband is just a data source for us. There is nothing incredibly complex about EEG technology actually, we just need that neurophysiological data. That data from the person that makes this injury visible. And so moving forward with the focus of the company really is on the data analytics and how we can make a general practitioner the quarterback of the recovery process, which is really who it should be.
They’re just not equipped to do that right now and so that’s our focus is how do we get the clinical community to get to these root causes, support mental health and use data to support the patient and empower them in a virtual capacity too. You know, to be able to connect with them virtually because they are seeing your data from a distance is really exciting opportunity for us and one positive that’s come out of this two-year lockdown.
[0:17:09.5] BP: Yeah and the data is really interesting. I remember trying to track my own headaches and symptoms like that and it is hard to do and it is really difficult to really explain it some days. I remember like, “Well, I felt like this last week” but you know, you don’t see your doctor every week. A lot of neurologists that I saw, it was a few months sometimes between appointments so trying to remember how I felt.
They’d be like, “Well, how did you feel?” and I have to think and be like, “Okay, well I wrote it down and if you look through this really long notebook you can kind of guess how I felt” and that’s the thing that’s really interesting about the app is the different ways to input symptoms, how you were doing at the time and then your doctor can really use that to help you and guide you rather than it’s kind of taking out that guessing game that’s definitely there with all of this.
[0:18:05.2] AK: Yeah and you can track your symptoms on the application too, so you can see, “Oh, it looks like every time I do X, Y, Z, I feel bad the next day” or you know, “Every time I do yoga I feel great” so you can start understanding what’s helping and what’s hindering your recovery just with the symptom tracking on the application and you can download that application for free on the Google Playstore if you search Neurovine. We are working on getting it on the Apple Store as well but right now, you can download just the symptom tracking application for free on the Google Playstore.
[0:18:38.1] BP: Well that’s great, people should definitely check it out because I have seen the app and it’s definitely helpful and is there anything else you would like to add before ending today’s episode?
[0:18:47.5] AK: No, I’m just grateful that you’re doing this. I think it’s so important for patients to have a resource like this so they can get tips and also just feel like you’re not alone on this journey.
[0:19:00.1] BP: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining and sharing all of your work and potential future work, which really excites me with post-concussion and brain injury survivors.
[0:19:09.3] AK: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks Bella.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:19:14.0] BP: Has your life been affected by concussions? Join our podcast by getting in touch. Thank you so much for listening to The Post Concussion Podcast and be sure to help us educate the world about the reality of concussion by giving us a share and to learn more, don’t forget to subscribe.
[END]
OTHER CONTENT YOU MAY LIKE
