We have just announced an upcoming webinar to provide a market update:  Top 10 Cognitive Fitness Events of 2008 – A Market Update.

When: Thursday December 11th, from 12:00 to 1:00 pm Pacific Time. The same webinar will be repeated on Thursday December 18th, from 9:00 to 10:00 pm Pacific Time.

The Top 10 Cognitive Fitness Events that will be discussed include:

1) February: Dakim secures a $10.6m investment from Galen Partners. Jack LaLanne becomes spokesperson.
2) April: The Government of Ontario, Canada, invests $10m in Baycrest to develop and commercialize cognitive fitness technologies.
3) April: University of Michigan researchers reveal in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences how computerized working memory training can generalize and improve fluid intelligence in healthy adults.
4) May: Humana unveils Games for Health initiatives, not renewing its agreement with Posit Science.
5) June: The US Army launches a new policy requiring cognitive screenings of all soldiers before deployment (in order to better diagnose potential brain-based disorders such as PTSD and TBI upon return).
6) June: Lumos Labs secures $3m investment from FirstMark Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.
7) July: health insurer OptumHealth announces a 3-year, $18m agreement with Brain Resource to offer web-based cognitive assessments to inform clinical diagnostics and treatments.
August: CogniFit secures $5m from Milk Capital.
9) September: The Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 is signed into law.
10) October: Allstate launches a large-scale research project to measure the impact of Posit Science InSight on driver safety for adults aged 50-75.

Context: The market for software applications that can help assess and enhance cognitive functions (Cognitive Fitness) is rapidly growing, as outlined in SharpBrains’ report The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008 (see Market Report). Published in March of this year, the report estimates that Brain Fitness market revenues grew from $100m in 2005 to $225m in 2007, in the US alone. Important developments during 2008 underscore the solid fundamentals for the continued growth of this category: public policy initiatives, wide scale cognitive assessments, multiple venture capital investments, major initiatives by insurance companies, and new published research. SharpBrains forecasts the market to grow above $2b by 2015.

Fees: This webinar costs $350. You can click Here to learn more and register. Free for SharpBrains’ contributors, Premium Research Circle members, reporters and fellow bloggers.