Brainhero

The corona pandemic has raised awareness of and destigmatized mental health issues. It has also increased acceptance of remote, home-based medical treatments, including medical devices and digital health apps. Brainhero steps into this space with its medically certified mobile EEG systems, which can be operated in conjunction with a tablet-based platform for delivering neurofeedback therapy for autism spectrum disorders and ADHD through gamification. 

Christof Goetz, an experienced entrepreneur and CEO of Brainhero, discovered neurofeedback therapy when his daughter was diagnosed with autism. Neurofeedback is a clinically established and non-invasive form of biofeedback that addresses problems resulting from neurological brain impairments. It involves training specific brain regions to restore normal electrical activity patterns (as measured by EEG) in brain regions identified as being over- or underactive. 

Christof quickly realized that neurofeedback therapy delivered in psychologists’ offices is expensive and difficult to access, in part because the EEG devices used by therapists are extremely expensive. He set himself the task of developing a compact, mobile EEG device to deliver neurofeedback therapy in a familiar home setting and with a gamification approach. This led to the establishment of Brainhero, which in 2022 became the first company to receive EU MDR approval for an EEG-mediated neurofeedback therapy system and also received medical device approval for a stand-alone, portable full EEG device that costs a fraction of conventional EEG devices. 

The Brainhero team’s vision is to develop these EEG platforms further in the direction of personalization and expansion of indications to a range of co-morbidities and other brain disorders, including anxiety, dementia, and depression. The EEG data being securely collected by Brainhero in the process of neurofeedback training is a tremendous resource for identifying patient subgroup profiles, and will be used to train algorithms designed to assist with diagnosis of conditions like autism, which is heterogeneous and often goes undiagnosed in girls and ethnic minorities. The full EEG and its operating software will find a multitude of applications in replacing existing bulky, expensive EEG hardware, with the long-term goal of making and interpreting an EEG scan as routine as an ECG in every general practitioner’s office. 

xista science ventures  is the lead seed stage investor in Brainhero. The company collaborates with academic institutions in Austria and abroad, both in the clinical arena and in leading-edge research into EEG data analysis. With the winning combination of an ambitious vision and strong execution, underpinned by solid science and clinical evidence, Brainhero can become the premier platform for delivery of clinically-certified home neurofeedback therapy in a multitude of brain-related conditions, and at the same time expand medical EEG applications into new territories.