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Founder facts
‣We are: Hamzah Selim and Aaron Lin, Mindstep co-founders.
‣We used to be: Medical students.
‣We are proud that: Mindstep research has been published in eight medical journals.
‣Mindstep metrics: 77,000+ people have received help from Mindstep for anxiety, depression, brain fog or impaired cognition.
Struggling with tiredness, poor concentration, low mood or memory problems? Mindstep, created by medics Hamzah Selim and Aaron Lin, is designed to spot cognitive impairment and provide you with a plan to improve your brain health.
Through incredible AI, the app is able to effectively screen your brain and triage early dementia symptoms, depression, anxiety, concussion, brain fog and migraine.
Mindstep is certified as a medical device by the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency). It could bring you peace of mind, but can also guide you towards suitable treatments and action plans. So how did two young medics come up with this seemingly miraculous device?
How it started
It was in a final year neuroscience lecture in 2018 that Selim was first inspired to solve a medical problem, using iPhone technology.
Students were learning how to track eye movements of patients by holding up a finger for the patient to follow. This practice is used as a rudimentary indicator of neurological disorders including dementia.
“The professor was saying, ‘Everyone does it wrong and it takes 50 years to master.’ And to be honest, he’s kind of right,” explains Selim.
Distracted and bored, Selim turned to Snapchat for entertainment. “I realised that Snapchat could put this filter on my face and track my eye movement with such precision, but a room of 100 medics couldn’t. Yet, one of the outputs is a silly picture while the other is potentially saving someone from a huge brain injury.”
Selim collaborated with Lin, whom he had met on a summer programme for aspiring medics. “Hamzah had this brilliant idea and he needed a co-founder who worked differently to him. He’s a great visionary. I’m Mr Execution,” says Lin.
I realised Snapchat could track my eye movement with such precision, but a room of 100 medics couldn’t.
Hamzah Selim, co-founder of Mindstep
Selim built much of the early tool himself and began showing it to A&E doctors as part of a research programme. Soon, NHS neurologists were asking him to add features. “They wanted to log age to calculate patients’ stroke risk and pick up tremors to exclude Parkinson’s disease,” says Selim. Many of those neurologists have now joined the Mindstep team.
“I knew the app was great but the AI needed loads more data... the more patients it saw the better it became,” Selim says. So, the two founders asked users to participate in a piece of research by taking a five-minute test.
“We said, ‘You’ll be helping create a device that one day could save people from neuro or mental-health problems’,” explains Selim. “We had 50,000 downloads in a week.” This caught the attention of investors, which meant Selim and Lin could continue to develop the technology.
How it’s going
Mindstep has since gone far beyond tracking eye movement. Using a set of tests and questions, the app’s seven-minute brain assessment screens for the most common neurological conditions and generates more than 15 metrics about your brain’s health. The assessments are all built by experts and peer-reviewed.
“We wanted the app to think like a doctor. As soon as we had the diagnostic part, people wanted to know, ‘Now what?’ To make people better, you need a care path,” says Selim.
Mindstep does just this. App users receive test scores across several areas of cognition, mood and lifestyle. By identifying your weaker areas, the app creates a brain-care plan according to your needs, from more than 100 evidenced-based tools.
“We’re all most familiar with late-stage dementia, but the disease kicks off much earlier with mild cognitive impairment. That is what Mindstep is really good at flagging. And that is a state where you can really alter your trajectory with lifestyle management,” says Selim.
For more severe symptoms, the app will tell you to seek help from an appropriate healthcare professional.
The future
Mindstep’s team is currently in talks with GP networks with the hope that the app will be used across NHS GP surgeries. This follows published medical research that showed Mindstep’s superior diagnostic efficacy over traditional GP tools.
First trials for this use case are launching soon in a number of GP practices. It marks a breakthrough moment for Lin and Selim, who says, “We’re getting there, we’re actually getting there!”