Neurology Researcher Wins National NIH Award for App That Predicts Fall Risk

"CatchU" is a multisensory digital health app, touted as a top technology for healthy aging practices in the 2025 NIA Start-Up Challenge

STONY BROOK, NY, January 30, 2026 - An app easily used off a smartphone that quantitatively measures someone's risk of falling is being recognized by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Aging (NIA) as a leading new technology to tackle one of the nation's largest healthcare challenges - improving healthy aging. The app's developer, Jeannette R. Mahoney, PhD, a Stony Brook Medicine neurology researcher, entered the NIA's Start-Up Challenge in 2025 along with 275 competitors nationwide. On January 28, the NIA named her and six other contestants as winners of the year-long competition.

Each winner will receive $65,000 to continue working on their technology designed to improve healthy aging. Mahoney's app, CatchU®…Before You Fall, employs a 10-minute digital health app that monitors simple reaction time. 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. The program measures how the information is perceived from multiple sensory signals and provides meaningful results with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) STEADI program.

"It is an honor to be selected as a winner in this competition and that our work aligns with the NIH's mission to advance transformative science and improve health outcomes for older adults," says Mahoney, Professor of Neurology & Chief of the Division of Cognitive and Sensorimotor Aging in the Renaissance School of Medicine (RSOM) at Stony Brook University.

"The prize that comes with this honor will afford us the opportunity to strengthen our leadership team, create deeper healthcare relationships to accelerate our commercial rollout, and showcase CatchU at premier medical conferences to drive visibility and traction of the product," adds Mahoney.

The NIA Start-Up Challenge organizers described the winners as "demonstrating outstanding innovation, scientific rigor, and commercial potential" with their inventions. They further characterized that "each team has shown remarkable dedication to addressing critical unmet needs in aging…(and) their solutions represent the future of aging research and care."

Falling, a growing problem

According to the CDC, 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.

These numbers are likely to grow exponentially in the coming years as the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) estimates that every day in the U.S., 10,000 people turn 65 and the number of older adults will more than double over the next several decades to top 88 million people. This would represent more than 20 percent of the U.S. population by 2050.

By 2030, it is estimated that the U.S. will spend over $101 billion on treating injuries from falls every year, which is why a digital health app to predict and prevent falls is so desperately needed, Mahoney emphasizes.

She also points out that falling can be overlooked - even by healthcare professionals - as a 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.

Additionally, an app like CatchU is urgently needed for older individuals 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. And when aging individuals develop diagnosed forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease, the issue of self-reporting becomes almost irrelevant.

CatchU was designed by Mahoney after a colleague Dr. Claudene George, a geriatrician, considered the clinical significance of 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.

Mahoney 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.

She and her colleagues, including her professional mentor Joe Verghese, MD, Chair of the Department of Neurology at the RSOM, have published their results around CatchU use in various peer-reviewed scientific journals including the Journal of Gerontology, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, and Multisensory Research. For the NIA Start-Up Challenge, they tested CatchU's ability to detect preclinical Alzheimer's disease.

In 2025, Mahoney received $10,000 for her start-up company when she was named one of 21 stage one finalists of the Start-Up Challenge. The entire project is dedicated to her grandmother, Jean Sisinni, who had fallen before she passed away in 2021.