When the best tech is not the best tech
As Co-Founder and Tech Lead of Thought-Wired, I am often shown examples of amazing brain-sensing technologies such as Neural Dust, neural prostheses, and other incredible research activities. I then get asked “Why isn’t Thought-Wired using this approach?” or “If other people are able to control complex bionic limbs, what’s so difficult about making a button or switch to allow basic communication?”
The short answer
We are taking an approach that will deliver a solution to our users in the shortest time-frame possible, and at the lowest price, which are two crucial requirements for a person with severe physical disability and their family.
This is particularly important for children, who are at an important developmental stage of life, and any time spent waiting for a solution to allow them to communicate would have an effect on the quality of the education they receive, the amount and depth of social interactions they can have, and the development of their individuality.
High pricing would add barriers and further delays to accessing a solution while families have to navigate through the bureaucracy of disability funding. Also, because a user requires 24/7 care, families are often depending on a single income with supplementary funding support.
Therefore, if Thought-Wired is able to deliver an affordable solution sooner, the potential repercussions from using it come into effect faster, which will trickle into other aspects of personal development and fuel the impact we are trying to deliver. The technology we have chosen to drive nous™ will allow us to do this, but at the expense of some sophistication early on.
The long answer
Let’s start with the work being done by research groups around the world. This is truly ground-breaking and is on the bleeding edge of technology in general. The granularity of control that some of these groups are able to achieve is fantastic. However, to achieve this level of control, these groups rely on implantable electrodes, either on the surface of the brain or deeper within the brain itself (electrocorticography or ECoG). This is fine in a lab environment, but the transition to a consumer level is going to require many clinical trials and will need to meet stringent regulatory requirements. It will take a long time for this to become accessible and affordable, because the surgery required to implant the electrodes will be risky and expensive.
If we are unwilling to put anything inside our users’ heads, the next best way to measure brain activity is to use electroencephalography (EEG) technology, where brain activity is detected from the scalp surface. Unfortunately, having a thick layer of bone between where the activity is coming from and the recording sensor means that much of the information is distorted or lost. There are many ways to mitigate this, from using more sensitive hardware, recording from multiple sites, and developing advanced digital signal processing algorithms. But again, for us, it comes down to what will work best for our users.
Here’s an example of a research-quality EEG recording set-up. It is able to provide full coverage of the brain, and costs more than $100,000. Naturally, we don’t want something that extreme, but if we scale it back to some of the cheapest and simplest research-grade equipment, we still get devices costing around $10k.
This is where consumer brain-sensing devices come in, and these are mostly billed as monitoring or biofeedback devices to help with mindfulness meditation or be used in entertainment. Even here, there are some variances in sophistication and corresponding prices. One of the better devices has 14 electrodes and costs $800 USD, which is far more accessible and affordable. However, we tested it extensively and found that while we could use it with nous™, the amount of time and effort required to set it up made it impractical for everyday use. Our potential users told us that this impracticality would make it unlikely for them to use it long term, so we changed our approach.
The devices we have selected to support with nous™ initially were chosen on the basis of their ease of use. As a result, these devices are generally on the more basic end of the scale and provide the least amount of EEG data or information to work with. However, we have tested the feasibility of our approach and shown that people are capable of using these devices with nous™ to provide simple communicative responses. More importantly, we have also determined that we are very close to being able to encapsulate our technology and provide something that will have an impact on people’s lives.
By choosing these devices that are easier to use we have shifted the responsibility of making nous™ work from our users to ourselves. It is up to us to develop our technology with them to meet their needs, instead of forcing them to meet the needs of our technology.
As the available hardware develops and improves, so too will nous™. We will continually build on the software technology driving nous™ and the functionality it provides. This is why a subscription model will work for our business. As device manufacturers make advances in their technology, nous™ will be able to pass them on to our users immediately.
Conclusion
Nobody in the world has achieved what we are trying to do commercially, and we aim to be the first. In the future, all of us will be using brain interfaces to interact with our environment and communicate in new and exciting ways, and Thought-Wired’s technology will be there to facilitate that.
For most of us though, the technology is still too slow and cumbersome to make us want to use it instead of our existing touch, keyboard, mouse, or speech interfacing methods. So we’re going to have to wait for some time for the technology to improve, however, it can make a difference for those who need it most, right now.
We are raising capital through an equity crowdfunding campaign to gain the momentum to have a working version of nous™ in the market within 9 months. We are excited to be able to start making an impact so soon, and are even more excited that there are already more than 130 people behind us and ready to help push us forward.
Our campaign is still live for another few days, so this is your last chance to join us as a foundational investor and help us to turn our vision into a reality. At Thought-Wired we believe that the world should be universally accessible to everyone regardless of their physical abilities or limitations, and the time to start shaping that world is now.
