Bussiness Ideas

Biotech Wallah Private Limited is building Zero Dementia, a smartphone-based cognitive triage platform for early detection of mild cognitive impairment and early dementia. LASI-DAD, India's first nationally representative dementia study, finds 7.4% prevalence in adults aged 60 and above, or approximately 8.8 million people living with dementia. Around three in four are never diagnosed, and those who are face a three-to-five-year delay from first symptom to diagnosis. Specialist neuropsychological assessment requires trained raters, licensed instruments and an hour of clinic time, unavailable across most of India. Existing digital tools largely score what a patient says, which locks them to English. Zero Dementia is a ten-minute assessment on any smartphone, needing no additional hardware. It captures voice, facial expression and eye movement from the front camera alongside short cognitive tasks, returning a triage output: normal, borderline, or see a neurologist. The core insight is that acoustic and kinematic features are properties of the vocal tract and motor system rather than of vocabulary, making them substantially language-independent, which is decisive in a multilingual, low-literacy population. Three choices differentiate it. The assessment routes adaptively around functional capability, so illiterate, deaf, blind and motor-impaired patients remain assessable. Every biomarker is selected for performance net of its confounders, including hearing loss, medication burden and education. The system abstains rather than guessing when evidence conflicts. Positioning is deliberately narrow: triage of symptomatic patients presenting to a clinic, not population screening, and never a diagnosis. Three provisional patents were filed in August 2026. Clinical validation is planned at SGPGI Lucknow.

Startup Teams

• 1 Isarar siddique (Director)
• 2 Arshi Niyaz (Director)

Incubation Details

• Incubator Name
  Integral Startups Foundation-Centre for Incubation and Entrepreneurship Development
• Incubator Host Institution
  Integral University
• State
  Uttar Pradesh
• City
  Lucknow