# Development and Evaluation of Portable Compendium of Psychophysical and Physiological Tests for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD)

> **NIH NIH R44** · EVON MEDICS, LLC · 2024 · $1,249,244

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
The Development and Evaluation of Portable Compendium of Psychophysical and Physiological Tests for
Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) is a project to develop an inexpensive, user-friendly,
digital chemosensory-sensorimotor acquisition and processing device, with cross-cultural validity for home or
office use for automated (a) staging of severity of age-related cognitive decline, (b) prognostication of people
with subjective cognitive impairment at risk for progressive neurodegenerative diseases, and (c) remote
surveillance of trajectory in motor and chemosensory markers of ADRD progression in elderly populations.
Given that some decline in cognition is expected with advancing age, it is very challenging for elderly people to
determine if their cognitive challenges are normal for age, or pathological. Similarly, our stakeholder survey of
physicians who treat geriatric populations revealed that <10% of these physicians expressed self-efficacy in
identifying early pathological cognitive decline in elderly patients complaining of subjective memory concerns,
whereas more than 95% feel comfortable with diagnosing moderate or severe dementia. This is problematic,
because, following onset of defining symptoms of dementia, ADRD progresses relentlessly, and no
intervention has proven to reverse, or even slow the progression of dementia; whereas early identification may
offer a more realistic opportunity for disease-modifying interventions to slow AD progression. Science has
shown that AD presents early (even preclinically) with motor and sensory impairments, particularly olfactory
dysfunctions. Therefore, an alternative approach to classification and prognostication of AD is to use precise
quantitative measurements of sensory and/or motor dysfunctions. Indeed, psychophysical tasks of olfaction,
such as odor identification tasks, have been found to predict AD development in normal aging, and to predict
AD progression in mild cognitive impairments (MCI). But these olfactory cognitive tasks have not been adopted
in practice or research for AD classification because of low specificity, challenges with interpretation,
susceptibility to education, culture, and language biases, and absence of defined cut-off scores for classifying
normal cognitive aging from MCI, or for prediction of MCIs who would soon develop dementia. Evon Medics, a
small business specializing in olfactory neurostimulation, tested various olfactory tasks in their prototype – the
Evon Medics Rapid Smell Test (EMRAST) – and determined that an olfactory sensorimotor impairment marked
by loss of reflex reduction of sniff magnitudes to intense or unpleasant odorants, differentiated progressive MCI
from normal cognitive aging, and quantitatively predicted MCI subjects that transitioned to dementia over 6-
month follow-up. The goal of this SBIR Fast-Track proposal is to refine and evaluate composite scores derived
from an extended portable version of EMRAST with psychophysical...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 11100060
- **Project number:** 4R44AG082621-02
- **Recipient organization:** EVON MEDICS, LLC
- **Principal Investigator:** Charles Chiedu Nwaokobia
- **Activity code:** R44 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $1,249,244
- **Award type:** 4N
- **Project period:** 2023-08-01 → 2026-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/11100060

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 11100060, Development and Evaluation of Portable Compendium of Psychophysical and Physiological Tests for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) (4R44AG082621-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/11100060. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*