App That Predicts Fall Risk Advances in a National Start-Up Competition

Falling can be an overlooked major health risk for millions of Americans, particularly for older adults, and one that can lead to or cause reduced mobility, lack of independence and death. Jeannette R. Mahoney, professor of neurology and chief of the new Division of Cognitive and Sensorimotor Aging in the Renaissance School of Medicine (RSOM) at Stony Brook University, has developed a smartphone solution that quantitatively gauges someone’s propensity to fall.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 30 percent of Americans over the age of 65 experience a fall annually. And more than three million older Americans require an emergency room visit every year because of fall-related injuries.

Called CatchU® …Before You Fall, the app has caught the eye of practitioners who care for the geriatric population and the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging (NIA). Mahoney’s app was selected as one of 21 finalists — out of nearly 300 competitors nationwide — in the NIA’s 2025 Start-Up Challenge.

Mahoney says the app is urgently needed because current available fall assessments are subjective and too reliant on self-reports, which can be limited, especially in the face of potential cognitive impairments. Additionally, the United States and the global population continue to age. Along with that comes increased risk of falling, as well as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

CatchU® was designed by Mahoney after her colleague Claudene George, a geriatrician, considered the clinical significance of the lab findings linking impaired multisensory integration to poor motor outcomes. She requested this test be available on a smartphone so that patients could be tested in the clinic. That was the moment where the idea for CatchU was born, noted Mahoney, who then developed and cultivated her app through her start-up company, JET Worldwide Enterprises Inc. The company holds an exclusive license to the patent-pending intellectual property from Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Mahoney said the product is dedicated to her grandmother, Jean Sisinni, who unfortunately fell before she passed away in 2021.

CatchU is described in the list of the NIA’s 2025 Stage 1 finalists as a “multisensory digital health app that quantitatively assesses risk for falls and preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.”

“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,” said Mahoney. “The science behind the app is that when we receive concurrent information from multiple sensory signals, the brain has a facilitative advantage to respond quicker than to either unisensory input alone.”

Mahoney’s work highlights the concept that people possess differential abilities to benefit from redundant information, where older adults with poor sensory integration on this simple reaction time test are at greater risk for falls, along with worse gait and balance.

She and her colleagues, including her professional mentor Dr. Joe Verghese, chair of the Department of Neurology at the RSOM, have published their results in various peer-reviewed scientific journals, including the Journal of Gerontology, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, & Multisensory Research.

As part of the NIA challenge, Mahoney will pursue CatchU’s ability to detect preclinical Alzheimer’s disease, given their most recent publication in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, demonstrating that poor ability to integrate visual and somatosensory information is associated with amyloid-beta pathology, a recognized biomarker for Alzheimer’s.

The NIA Stage 1 finalists in the Start-Up Challenge represent a multidisciplinary group of researchers and entrepreneurs who have developed ideas for science-driven technologies and products that have the potential to advance the fields of aging and aging-related diseases and help the aging society at large.

Finalists like Mahoney will receive entrepreneurial training sessions, one-on-one mentorship, sponsored attendance at a life sciences entrepreneurship conference and cash prizes.

All Stage 1 finalists receive a $10,000 prize for their company. Seven of the 21 semi-finalists will go on to receive a top prize of $65,000 for their company. The seven finalists will be announced in early 2026.