Thursday, May 2, 2024

Abbey Road helps medtech start up company prescribe music to patients

A Groundbreaking Hull health-tech start-up, is prescribing music to help ease pain and anxiety and has been welcomed into Abbey Road Red – the tech incubation programme at the world-famous London studios.

The venue is renowned for its creativity and technological excellence. It is a global icon that has been the musical home to The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Shirley Bassey, Cilla Black, Ed Sheeran, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, and Adele; to name but a few.

Incubation at Abbey Road Red will provide MediMusic with a development springboard to explore the effect of sound on physiology, relationships with key music and technology industry stakeholders, and advice from Red’s specialist mentor network.

MediMusic – is the brainchild of Gary Jones and Matt Wheldon. It works by fingerprinting algorithms which scientifically mimic the human brain’s response to individual music tracks. Personalised playlists are auto-created that cause a positive physiological and emotional response. And, by using an optional heart rate monitor their Artificial Intelligence-driven Digital Drip™ analyses a listener’s physiological response to the playlist tracks. The  Digital Drip knows what that response should be. If the heart rate falls outside of the expected threshold subsequent tracks are swapped out in real-time to bring the heart rate back in line and the resulting data is captured by the Digital Drip for future use by a machine learning process, to refine subsequent playlist creation.

Red will help MediMusic refine and launch its next set of features including new bio-markers alongside heartrate, machine learning to fine-tune its dataset and improve its automated playlist curation, an enhanced set of proprietary data identifiers to describe the medical effects of songs, tackling the new area of pain reduction with music, and more.

Gary Jones, co founder of MediMusic said ““We’re thrilled to have the support of Abbey Road Red and its music tech incubator programme to develop our revolutionary innovation of prescribing music as medicine. MediMusic has managed to digitally fingerprint the DNA of music so we can deliver the right songs as medicine to ease anxiety and stress. You could say it’s a musical pharmaceutical. Our initial clinical trials prove it has a very encouraging future in the treatment of patients. Using our technology, doctors, nurses and care home workers will be able to monitor the effect of the music in a clinical environment and see the benefits for themselves.

“Using MediMusic could also reduce the use of drugs in treating anxiety and pain in patients by up to a quarter, thereby saving money for the NHS.

“We passionately believe dispensing music as medicine is going to revolutionise the treatment of people in pain and stress, and we’re honoured that Abbey Road Red will help us on this journey.”

Isabel Garvey, Managing Director, Abbey Road Studios said: “We identified music for wellness as an area of considerable importance at the 2019 Abbey Road Red Demo Day and have explored it resolutely since then. It’s incredibly exciting to take this to the next level with Gary and the team at MediMusic and explore music as a form of dispensed treatment, just as the sector is starting to show signs of maturity and genuine possibility. We look forward to helping MediMusic make its vision a reality which could positively impact millions of lives while relieving stress on health services.”

Karim Fanous, Innovation Manager, Abbey Road Red added: “Studies have long shown a direct correlation between music and anxiety or stress reduction, as well as the potential for pain reduction. But implementing this research into effective dispensation in a medical context remains a big challenge. In MediMusic we believe we’ve found a music tech start-up which can succeed, supported by early traction in clinical trials, and a founder with anticipative vision who started this journey seven years ago. It’s a very special opportunity to play our part at Red.”

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