Lemotion Therapeutics
Welcome to
Lemotion Therapeutics
Our Mission
The mission of Lemotion Therapeutics is to create a therapist-centered digital-biologic treatment for persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Our goal is an FDA-approved and patented treatment to improve a subskill of ASD Social interaction vital to having a full-time job, friends, and romantic relationships. Lemotion uses proven learning techniques that change whole brain activation.
Our Method
Lemotion® therapy improves social interaction with respect to full-time jobs, friends, and romantic relationships is by addressing a deficit common to persons with Autism. Specifically, it improves the ability in social interaction to recognize and express communication of internal emotion state. This is a skill neurotypicals generally do effortlessly and quickly, but is usually beyond autistic individuals.
As a step toward approval of our original therapist-digital-biologic therapy, our planned pilot study aims to show on MRI's that our therapy brings whole-brain activation patterns closer to those of neurotypicals and that our product improves scores on the standardized autism tests.
Company Personnel
(Wilkins, Keltner, Rao)
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David C. Wilkins, PhD
CEO and Chief Scientist
Lemotion Therapeutics
David has over 30 years of academic research experience in Artificial Intelligence and Expert Skill Learning at Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His initial research was conducted at the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University, which pioneered the field of Expert Skill Learning within Artificial Intelligence.
For 5 years, while on the faculty in Symbolic Systems at Stanford, his five research grants and teaching were in the area of Emotions and Autism. He left Stanford to form Lemotion Therapeutics. In the last 12 years, the company created and implemented an original proprietary method for improving a key communication subskills for individuals on the spectrum. This is expected to significantly improve the main DSM-5 deficit of Autism Spectrum Disorder, namely, Poor Social Interaction.
David Wilkins
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Dacher Keltner, PhD
Founding Emotion Advisor, Lemotion Therapeutics.
Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology,
University of California, Berkeley
Dacher has over 30 years of research experience in the area of Emotions and Social Interaction. He brings unparalleled expertise in emotion recognition and expression in the auditory, visual, and touch modalities in a social interaction context. He has consulted extensively for Google, Facebook, Apple, and Pinterest. Many of his emotion studies have been healthcare related, and he has published two autism studies.
Dacher Keltner and David Wilkins started a close collaboration in 2011, a year prior to the founding of Lemotion Therapeutics. Dacher's Social Interaction Lab possesses deep expertise in the creation and validation of a wide range of auditory and visual emotion media. This expertise will be invaluable toward the creation of a large emotion media library that is required in order to support the hundreds of hours of graduated emotion recognition and expression exercises needed in the planned pilot study for validation of the the Lemotion® product.
At UC-Berkeley, Dacher is the Director of the Social Interaction Laboratory and Co-Director of the Greater Good Science Center.
Dacher Keltner
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Geetha Rao PhD
Chief Compliance Officer, Lemotion Therapeutics. CEO, Springborne Life Sciences
Geetha Rao will head the company's regulatory and product commercialization strategy. She has 25 years of experience with medical devices and more recently has focused on digital health products. Geetha has a PhD in engineering from MIT and is a graduate of the Stanford Business School.
Geetha has provided valuable business expertise since 2019. She will play a key role in interfacing with the FDA and ensuring that the design of the eventual Lemotion® clinical trials will be sufficient for separate FDA efficacy approvals for the digital therapeutic products and a biological intervention.
Geetha Rao
Collaborators
(Lawson, Bilalić)
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Merim Bilalić, PhD
Professor, Cognitive Psychology,
Northumbia University, UK
Merim Bilalić has deep expertise in many of the areas at the heart of the mission of Lemotion Therapeutics. His major focus is (1) the learning of expert skills that require many hundred to thousands of hours of deliberate practice; (2) the cognitive architecture of novice problem solving and how extended practice rewires the whole brain to turn novice slow rule-based expertise into fast mentally-effortless expertise; and (3) and the neuroscience of expertise.
Since the invention of MRI, a little over twenty years ago, hundreds of neuroscience studies have been published to elucidate the expert skill learning process used by Lemotion. Merim has woven them in to a coherent fabric, in his book "The Neuroscience of Expertise", published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.
Janet Lawson
Merim Bilalić
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Janet Lawson, LFMT
CEO, Executive Director
Autistry Studios, Marin, CA
Autistry Studios is a non-profit 501(c)3 and was founded in 2010 by Janet Lawson and Dan Swearingen. Their son Ian, now a young adult, is on the Autism Spectrum.
Autistry Studios mission is to help teens and young adults on and about the Autism Spectrum to become successfully independent by leveraging their interests and talents while creating a community.
Among its programs is the Autistry Comprehensive Adult Program (ACAP) which is a three, four, or five - day a week - program staffed at 2 students per staff person and is a community-based day program.
Autistry Studios began supporting Lemotion Therapeutics in 2018, by allowing us to gather user experience data of our products with young adults. The future plans are to allow their students to participate in the Lemotion® pilot study in a group setting.
Janet Lawson
Since its founding in 2012, Lemotion Therapeutics has developed an original proprietary assessment and treatment methods for improving ASD social interaction, by improving the ability in social interaction to recognize and express non-verbal communication of internal emotion state. This is a skill neurotypicals generally do effortlessly, but is usually beyond those on the autism spectrum.
At this point, major parts of a very original treatment method has been designed and implemented in working software. Many leading autism researchers are supportive and have given feedback on the design and software. A team with deep expertise in the specific areas required has been assembled. These areas of expertise are autism treatments for young adult; emotion psychology; artificial intelligence, expert skill learning; and the neuroscience of emotion communication, autism, and expert skill learning. Provisional patents have been filed.
All that is required at present is for the team to be funded for refinement of our software, the integration of existing emotion media libraries, and using these in conjunction with a therapist is a pilot study. This pilot study is expected to show on MRIs that solving 300+ hours of Lemotion® exercises brings whole-brain activation patterns closer to those of typicals, and improves scores on the the major standardized autism tests.
In 2003, founder David Wilkins decided to change his focus from being a tenured professor leading a large well-funded AI research group, to using his background to provide help in the near term to a struggling population. This major change was a result of losing his wife, Janet Sniezek, to cancer.
It took David two years to find the struggling population that could best benefit from his AI and expert skill learning background. Upon discovering the challenge of Autism with non-verbal and emotion communication, it was love at first sight. The challenges individuals with Autism and their families face are enormous, and he felt he could make a difference by addressing a core deficit common to almost everyone on the spectrum.