Winterlight Labs

Winterlight Labs, established in 2015 in Toronto, Canada, specializes in developing tablet-based assessments that are fast, objective, and stress-free for detecting cognitive impairments associated with dementia and mental illness. The company’s proprietary technology extracts speech-based digital biomarkers from short snippets of speech, analyzing hundreds of language markers to assess cognitive health. Winterlight Labs’ technology is trusted by five of the top ten Life Sciences companies to measure disease progression and response to therapy and is currently used in a dozen clinical trials to track changes and identify treatment responses. The company automates the review of clinical assessment administration and scoring in clinical trials and provides a speech analysis API for integrating with apps or devices that continuously collect speech data. Winterlight Labs researches speech patterns across all ages to build better tools for disease detection and monitoring. In January 2023, Cambridge Cognition acquired Winterlight Labs. The company has announced data demonstrating the sensitivity of speech-based digital measures in detecting longitudinal changes in Alzheimer’s disease in collaboration with Genentech and partnered with Alzheimer Center Amsterdam to decentralize patient assessments in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease research. Winterlight Labs has launched support for French, Spanish, and German linguistic analysis and developed custom in-house analytical validation tools for linguistic elements of speech. The company participates in the Digital Medicine Society’s Tour of Duty to develop resources for the adoption of digital measures in clinical research. Using natural language processing and artificial intelligence, Winterlight Labs detects changes in neurological and psychiatric symptoms through speech, extracting over 550 features of speech and language to measure fine-grained changes that traditional assessments cannot. Their technology has been used to study neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases and disorders, including Alzheimer’s Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, Frontotemporal Dementia, Parkinson’s Disease, Depression, and Schizophrenia. Additionally, Winterlight Labs has developed a Quality Assurance platform for the review of clinical interviews and collaborates with leading memory clinic Alzheimer Center Amsterdam to develop a remote measurement toolbox for preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. The company has received support from the pan-Canadian AGE-WELL Network of Centres of Excellence, the Ontario Brain Institute, Ontario Centres of Excellence, and the University of Toronto Banting and Best Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.