There’s an App for That

HEALTH

There’s An App for That

Israeli company aims to help mental health patients with new technology.

AMIR SHOAM CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Millions of mental health sufferers struggle with the impression that no one else knows exactly how they feel. A new Israeli partnership with a Detroit connection seeks to change things.

Ziv Yekutieli, Ph.D., studied both electrical engineering and medicine at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and Tel Aviv University and worked at Intel, where he was hoping he could develop chips to be implanted in the brains of disabled people and stroke survivors. Once he had realized that was not the case, he and his friend Dima Gershman left the company and founded Montfort (Mon4t) in 2017.

Talking to doctors, Yekutieli realized that they did not need new technology, but ways to use existing technology more efficiently.

“The patient isn’t in the clinic 99.9% of the time,” Yekutieli said. “With diabetes or cardiovascular or lung diseases, it doesn’t matter when you catch the person. In neurology, it’s an entirely different world. Things greatly vary day to day, moment to moment.”

Mon4t’s first proof of concept was a home version of a common test for Parkinson’s patients. In 2018, the company won the Henry Ford Health System’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Challenge. Professor Peter LeWitt, the director of the Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Program at the hospital, has since become an adviser to the company, and recently, its chief medical officer.

Detroit was also the first U.S. city that Yekutieli had visited, as part of an American Technion Society delegation.

“In neurology, you don’t put a thermometer into the patient’s mouth and get a temperature,” Yekutieli said. “We quickly realized that if we wanted to make something holistic and agile, for a

Dr. Ziv Yekutieli

MONTFORT