By GREGORY ZELLER //
From the species that crafted “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” comes an app that might be better described as “I’m about to fall – do something!”
That’s the gist of CatchU (officially, CatchU … Before You Fall), a “clinical multisensory assessment tool” and the brainchild of Renaissance School of Medicine Professor of Neurology Jeanette Mahoney.
The smartphone-based solution gets a jump on Life Alert and other after-fall response devices by helping elderly users and others at risk of taking a dramatic tumble prevent the fall from which they can’t get up.
Mahoney, also the chief of the Renaissance School’s Division of Cognitive and Sensorimotor Aging, designed the app to quantitatively gauge someone’s propensity to fall based on a simple set of real-time data – an intriguing enough idea for the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging to select CatchU as a Stage 1 finalist in its 2025 Start-Up Challenge.
Jeanette Mahoney: Fall gal.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 30 percent of Americans over the age of 65 experience a fall each year – resulting in 3 million-plus emergency room visits and more than 38,000 deaths.
As the U.S. population continues to age – and with additional factors like Alzheimer’s disease and dementia stirring the pot – the fall risk grows greater each year.
Other technologies designed to predict and prevent falls already exist, but according to Mahoney, contemporary fall assessments are subjective and too reliant on self-reports – making them especially limiting, considering the cognitive impairments associated with Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions.
Enter geriatrician Claudene George, a Renaissance School colleague investigating the clinical significance of laboratory findings linking impaired multisensory integration to poor motor outcomes. George was interested in transferring the findings to a smartphone-enabled app to better facilitate clinical testing – and hearing this sparked Mahoney’s innovation lightbulb.
Leveraging a patent-pending intellectual property licensed from the Bronx-based Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Mahoney launched a startup company called JET Worldwide Enterprises and began cultivating the CatchU app, which hit virtual shelves in 2022.
The multisensory app calculates the user’s ability to see and touch different real-world objects and, based on those responses, can estimate the risk of potential falls.
“Essentially, we have a 10-minute digital health app that monitors simple reaction time as a person is asked to respond as quickly as possible to targets that one can either see, feel or see and feel at the same time,” Mahoney said.
The science behind the app is thicker than it sounds – though it sounds pretty thick even when explained slowly: “When we receive concurrent information from multiple sensory signals,” Mahoney explains, “the brain has a facilitative advantage to respond quicker than to either unisensory input alone.”
In short: When a person can see and touch something, the brain responds quicker than when a person can only see or touch something. And when it’s run through CatchU’s algorithms, this data can help determine if someone is a fall risk – essentially, slower reaction times equal worse gait, less balance and a greater chance of a dangerous stumble.
Mahoney and colleagues – including her professional mentor, Joe Verghese, chairman of the Renaissance School’s Department of Neurology – have published CatchU-related findings in various peer-reviewed scientific journals, including Neurology Live and Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
They also discussed the app’s potential for detecting preclinical Alzheimer’s disease – specifically, that poor ability to integrate visual and somatosensory information is associated with amyloid-beta, a recognized Alzheimer’s biomarker – in a March article published by Alzheimer’s & Dementia, the journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
Meanwhile, the quest continues for top honors in the National Institute on Aging’s Start-Up Challenge.
As one of 21 Stage 1 finalists – out of nearly 300 competitors to throw their hats into the Start-Up Challenge – JET Worldwide Enterprises has already earned a $10,000 award. Seven of those 21 remaining competitors will earn a top prize of $65,000, with the NIA expected to announce the winners in early 2026.
