Mind Machine Interfaces and How They can Help Cure ADD
From Chapter 11 of Plugged In: How Mind Machine Interfaces Will Transform the World.
Jake Stauch didn’t know what he wanted to do after college, but he did know he needed a job, so when a job opened in a neuroscience lab cleaning EEG headsets, he took it. “I learned a lot about EEG while working and became really interested in it,” Stauch said, reminiscing on how he started down his career path. Stauch was also part of an entrepreneur club, and as they sat brainstorming ideas, he thought back to the EEG headsets he spent countless hours cleaning, and he realized, “We know when people are paying attention and kind of what their emotional states are when they look at stuff,” he explained as he described the inception of what would ultimately become NeuroSpire. “That would probably be interesting to apply to advertising and marketing.” Stauch took this idea and ran with it: NeuroSpire, the result of this brainstorming, was a company that would monitor consumer’s neurological responses to certain products and marketing stimuli. Although initially successful, Stauch quickly realized that the market wasn’t quite there. “What ended up happening is it was really more of a consulting company,” Stauch said. While profitable, it was not scalable, because NeuroSpire’s customers weren’t willing to train their own staff, instead relying on Stauch and his team to complete the tests. As NeuroSpire petered out, Stauch was already thinking of his next project. He remembers people talking to him about their children’s focus problems, saying, “Couldn’t my kids wear your headset and you could tell them when they were and weren’t paying attention?” This inspiration bore his next company, NeuroPlus.
As NeuroPlus states on its website, “Research into neuroplasticity shows such training can make your brain better at paying attention over time — just like exercising a muscle!”. NeuroPlus has designed a number of therapeutic video games to help train one’s brain. These games are aimed at students and children with ADHD or ADD, who have trouble focusing. The video games are controlled by an EEG headset the player is wearing and have the player respond to certain stimuli on screen, while ignoring other distractions. The headset, designed and sold by NeuroPlus, additionally tracks movement, which is also integrated into the game. As the patient progresses it gets harder and requires deeper concentration and focus. This sort of learning has been proven to have significant results. NeuroPlus completed a study in 2016 with 60 children who had ADHD to test the efficacy of the program. The researchers had each child go through a series of cognitive tests as a baseline. They then split the group of children and had half use NeuroPlus for 10 weeks and half go on with their everyday treatment. After those 10 weeks, they repeated the tests. From this study, they saw that the children who had used NeuroPlus performed about 4 times better than those who had just continued with their normal treatments.
I asked Stauch whether his technology was being used with patients who have had a traumatic brain injury (TBI), an injury that requires extensive mental rehabilitation. He told me that although they don’t explicitly market towards the TBI community, they have many users who have TBIs and have reported very positive reviews of the usefulness of the NeuroPlus system in this setting as well.
As NeuroPlus pushes forward, Stauch is hoping to find new avenues where his technology can be effective. NeuroPlus is pioneering a potentially groundbreaking new treatment of adolescent mental health issues, something that has been increasing drastically in recent years.
The story of Jake Stauch and NeuroPlus is one of just many, demonstrating how mind machine interfaces are reaching into all areas of care. It is companies and applications like these that are the reason that this industry will be worth over 100 billion dollars by 2020.
Stay tuned to hear more incredible stories of how these interfaces are changing people’s lives and our perception of the human mind. I hope you enjoyed this post — if you want to connect you can reach me here via email admangan2018@gmail.com or connect with me on social: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. If you like what you read and want to learn more about this amazing technology, please buy the paperback or ebook version on amazon! Here is the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H7RJLYC
