NATO Announces Sana Health as winner of the NATO Innovation Challenge to Develop Device to Optimize Performance of Soldiers in Combat

The modern war-fighter faces increasing cognitive demands, exponentially more information, and a greater need for mental resilience than ever before. Sana, a device that uses audiovisual neuromodulation to produce a deep state of relaxation and optimize recovery, was chosen as the most promising technology to help address this growing need.

Sana is a wearable device that guides the user into a state of relaxation in just 10 minutes. In addition to the immediate relaxation effects, the device helps return the brain to optimum brainwave states over time. This has applications across pain, addiction, anxiety and sleep problems. Given the state of the opioid crisis and the market effects of this catastrophe, this discovery has huge implications.

Richard Hanbury, Founder and CEO of Sana, originally developed the earliest prototype after a jeep crash in Yemen in 1992 left him in severe, chronic pain and a 5-year life expectancy. The earliest prototype wiped out all of his nerve damage pain and saved his life.

Since then, Hanbury and Sana have been on a mission to bring this technology to the world and to help the millions of people in need of non-drug solutions to reduce pain, facilitate sleep, diminish anxiety, and eliminate addiction.

Sana has completed ground-breaking clinical trials in Opioid Use Disorder (OUD), fibromyalgia with third-party verification of top experts in each field. In patients with fibromyalgia, Sana outperformed the top-marketed drugs for addressing symptoms of depression, anxiety and sleep disorders.

Whilst these are small trials, the early signs are exceptional. Sana is following up with larger-scale studies, including a 3-month investigation in patients with neuropathic pain with Dr. David Putrino at Mount Sinai, a Multiple Sclerosis study in the final planning stages at the Cleveland Clinic, and a post-operative pain study being planned at the University of Pennsylvania. Sana has applied to the FDA for a de novo clearance for fibromyalgia and hopes to be on market early in 2020.

In preparation for the NATO competition, Sana worked with a group of digital health scientists from HITLAB, one of the world’s preeminent digital health testing labs, in New York City to launch a rapid pilot study to investigate the device’s efficacy with fatigue mitigation. Late last month Sana completed a successful 24hr fatigue mitigation study with HITLAB, led by Prof. Stan Kachnowski, Director of the Digital Health Certification Program at Columbia Business School Executive Education.

A briefing of the results from this study can be found at www.hitlab.org/sanastudy

With the recent wins at UCSF Digital Health Awards, Anthem, and NATO Innovation Summit, Sana is collecting more and more evidence that it is a highly effect non-pharmacological treatment for chronic pain, anxiety, and addiction, and should be in every physicians’ toolkit to help patients.