Brain health is often associated primarily with memory — but by the time memory changes or other forms of cognitive decline become noticeable, the underlying processes may have been unfolding for years. SuperSenses — an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant — is on a mission to establish an “early warning system” for cognitive decline by measuring the health of a person’s five senses, which can flag future impairments years before traditional cognitive assessments detect a problem. By catching even subtle changes to vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch, SuperSenses’s test can open a new window for earlier intervention.
We chatted with SuperSenses Founder and CEO Datar Sahi, who discussed why current medical protocols miss this early diagnostic window, and why measuring the brain's inputs — not just its outputs — could reshape how we think about prevention, healthy aging and lifelong brain health.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Please tell us about SuperSenses.
SuperSenses is a 30-minute check on your brain health. It measures the status of your brain’s “inputs” — that is, your five senses. By doing so, you get an assessment on how well your brain is working and a prediction on how it will continue to function in the future.
Modern medicine is currently focused on evaluating your brain health by measuring its “outputs” — for example, looking at speech patterns, running labs and blood tests, or conducting tests such as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), which assess things like executive functions, memory, attention and concentration. Essentially, it’s a reactive approach.
Our approach is proactive. Cognition is downstream of your senses; without sensory input, nothing else is happening. So a decline in the brain’s sensory inputs are the earliest possible predictive signal that something is wrong. And if you can restore those sensory inputs early enough, many times that function returns. But if you don’t catch those signals and don’t restore reduced sensory function, then it absolutely predicts decline — especially if there are multiple senses declining. In short: You can rehabilitate your senses, but it’s very difficult to reverse cognitive decline once it’s begun.
Your approach is unique. Why has modern medicine not been focused on this?
This is not a failure of care; it’s just a failure of tools. Your ophthalmologist knows that your eye health is directly connected to and can forecast brain health. Your audiologist knows that hearing is a modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline. But these and other specialists don’t talk to each other, so there’s a lost opportunity to understand how those individual signals — when looked at holistically — can more clearly point to potential future cognitive problems.
What we’ve done is take the top senses-related risk factors for cognitive decline and designed one test to measure them all on a single platform. By putting them all together, we provide a truly objective viewpoint on how someone is doing overall, neurologically speaking.
Also, specialists often do what’s called low-level binary screening; essentially, they are waiting for one of your senses to deteriorate until it’s severe enough that they can do something about it. For example, an audiologist might only take note when your hearing degrades to, say, 75%, then they will give you a cochlear implant or other device. But they’re not tracking that initial 25% hearing loss.
We’re not waiting for dramatic hearing loss to start tracking it. Every 10 decibels of hearing loss creates a massive increased risk of cognitive decline — and every single sense behaves the same way. And when you track multiple senses declining, you’re basically tracking cognitive aging itself. That’s why we look at the full spectrum of sensory health so people can understand where they are on the lifetime trajectory of their senses.
How does the test work?
We mail you four taste strips in a pouch, 12 microencapsulated scratch-and-sniff smell cards and a two-point touch discriminator. Those, plus your phone, our app and a pair of headphones, give you everything you need to complete the test in 30 minutes.
It’s quite fun, actually — it’s like a game. You’re smelling things, you’re tasting and touching things, then reporting to the app what you’re seeing, feeling, touching, smelling and tasting. At the end, you get a score for each sense, and you also get a composite overall sensory score.
With our senior living customers, we either certify staff to administer the test, or we run a couple of classes per year that include these fun activities. We’ve gotten tremendously positive feedback. People want to protect their brains, but they had no idea that this was possible. After we’ve created this awareness, many people do something about it: They get new glasses prescriptions or get fitted for hearing aids, for example.
What prompted you to found SuperSenses?
My twin sister and I were born on Halloween, just a week after our mom’s own birthday. One October, I was talking with my mom and mentioned that our birthday was coming up next week, and she said, “Oh, it is?” I thought she was joking at first, because this memory lapse seemed to come out of nowhere. I called my sister to discuss it, and she told me that our mom had started to become forgetful, and that the decline happened fast.
So I started looking into how this could have happened so suddenly. Turns out, she had been having issues with her eyes, her ability to smell and her sense of taste. Everyone had written off these issues as just part of aging, or that she had a cold or the like. But three of her senses had been declining for years, yet nobody had been really paying attention to it. That’s when I connected the dots and put all this together, which was the spark for starting SuperSenses.
You graduated from the AgeTech Accelerator earlier this year. Can you tell us about your experience with that?
When you live and breathe something every day, even if it’s revolutionary, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. The AgeTech Accelerator helped us work with some lovely people who helped us see our business with fresh eyes. Conducting consumer surveys and getting empirical data was a valuable learning experience. And to work with trained people like a copywriter and graphic designer who could interpret our messaging for a particular audience was worth its weight in gold.
What’s up next for SuperSenses?
We work with researchers from places like the National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins and other prominent organizations — most of them are working with us for free — who are incredibly excited about SuperSenses because this belongs out in the world. Frontline clinicians are unaware of the senses-brain connection, or if they are aware of it, it’s usually just one modality — just vision or hearing, for example. And even if they do know about it, there’s been no standardized way to see it over time. We’re taking the work of these researchers, which is making these causal connections, and bringing it straight to everybody.
We don’t and never will sell our own interventions or cures; we don’t want a conflict of interest. We are interested only in mastering the monitoring aspect. We’re here to help people as an objective platform that can show them what’s happening over time. This is a revolution in brain health, and from our perspective, the only remaining piece is raising awareness.
To learn more about SuperSenses, visit their website.
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