46 | AUGUST 12 • 2021 

HEALTH

M

illions of mental health sufferers 
struggle with the impression 
that no one else knows exactly 
how they feel. A new Israeli partnership 
with a Detroit connection seeks to change 
things.
Ziv Yekutieli, Ph.D., studied both 
electrical engineering and medicine at the 
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 
Haifa and Tel Aviv University and worked 
at Intel, where he was hoping he could 
develop chips to be implanted in the brains 
of disabled people and stroke survivors. 
Once he had realized that was not the case, 
he and his friend Dima Gershman left the 
company and founded Montfort (Mon4t) 
in 2017.
Talking to doctors, Yekutieli realized 
that they did not need new technology, 

but ways to use existing technology more 
efficiently.
“The patient isn’t in the clinic 99.9% of 
the time,” Yekutieli said. “With diabetes or 
cardiovascular or lung diseases, it doesn’t 
matter when you catch the person. In 
neurology, it’s an entirely different world. 
Things greatly vary day to day, moment to 
moment.”
Mon4t’s first proof of concept was 
a home version of a common test for 
Parkinson’s patients. In 2018, the company 
won the Henry Ford Health System’s 
Artificial Intelligence (AI) 
Challenge. Professor Peter 
LeWitt, the director of the 
Parkinson’s Disease and 
Movement Disorders Program 
at the hospital, has since become 

an adviser to the company, and recently, its 
chief medical officer.
Detroit was also the first U.S. city 
that Yekutieli had visited, as part of an 
American Technion Society delegation.
“In neurology, you don’t put a 
thermometer into the patient’s mouth 
and get a temperature,” Yekutieli said. 
“We quickly realized that if we wanted to 
make something holistic and agile, for a 

Israeli company aims to help 
mental health patients with 
new technology.

AMIR SHOAM CONTRIBUTING WRITER

There’s An 
App for That

Dr. Ziv 
Yekutieli 

MONTFORT

