The Business of the Brain - VLAB Panel May 18, 2010

It's not every tuesday night that you get to talk about thought  controlled machines.Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) promises a quantum leap in human interaction and technology--enabling our thoughts and emotions to control devices and enabling them to be aware of our thoughts, and to some extent our feelings.

Work on BCI begun in the 1970's at UCLA under a grant from the National Science Foundation, followed by a contract from DARPA. Today there are around 300 Million brain toting people in the United States alone, thus paving the path for Entrepreneurial opportunities of far-reach consequence.

BCI is at a critical juncture in it's evolution. Still predominantly finding life at Universities around the country, there are a small, yet growing group of neuroscientists, entrepreneurs representing a number of different traditions and unrelated industries who are teaming up to develop applications out of the already developed BCI technology and research data gathered.




Showed clips from The Matrix of Kiana reeves getting info downloaded into brain -- I know Kung Fu

There's is reaearch going on at SCU and DARPA to download data into say a military piolts brain

But that's still far off. However we can still do things like control Twitter, send an email , etc

BCI have found a way to record impulses in brain and control it

Monkey in a box video
Andrew schwartz motorlab ar Univ of Pittaburg video ....demo of robot arm xo trollled by monkeys brains

Three kinds of bci ...

1 non invasive : where comercial relm is. It's a cap that goes on scalp . Measures brain waves -- EEG. Brain wave and single fidelloty aren't that strong though ...

CBS reporter amazed -- Scott pelley video 60 seconds

Partially invasive -- ECOG

Invasive -- intracortical electrodes impanted in grey matter

The market -- stage of computers before apple. Very new stage

Key presentor - David Dickinson from Zeo

Zeo -- the birth of sleep wellness
Mission to help ppl discover power of sleep

Found by 3 brown students .

Talks about Sleep Wellness.

75% adults trouble sleeping each year
100,000 fall asleep at the wheel
< 5%: 45% chance of heart disease

Zeo is a headband u wear at night . It tracks your sleep pattern.

People go to bed tired but wired , caffienw, laptop, or tv at night

Most of us don't sleep well becauae of our lifestyle.

You were meant to sleep in a cave

Large in home db of sleep data.

Lessons from a bci startup:
- innovation is stuff. It ain't abut technology it's about pgucology and meeting peoples needs.
- business model, test, test, retest. VCs invest in business models
- creating advantage -- it's a layer cake ... Got to have layers of protection against ur product . Get a superior product, UI, get right lawyers, keep Somethings secret, have high quality stds, sc valudation and endorsement , tm'ing

Bottom line find the benefits of your idea and sell to your customers.

Jim -- see opportunity for bci in middleware, opp to provide solns.
  , bring the prod to mkt. See opp across board ...think it's bottomless ...

Larry: system he developed for brain figure printing is not user friendly .

What do you say to critics that this isn't find tunned enough ?

Tim -- linking systems to the cloud ... That's were the innovation is

Opportunity for software engr ... 20% business .... Most of opp are at software , database, cloud engineering

Real answer consumer should own Data. Business answer that meta data is very valuable -- Tim

How long before an early dedexition device hits market . Larry Just got issued a patent. Texhnoloy is there, take 3 yrs and a whole lot of money .

Technology exist today , merely pulling them together is the challenge right now .

Tim sees this as consumers taking control of there own health .
Consumer would own Data and equipment .
Moving from health care to health

Giving consumer a scale to measure progress .... James

Other opportunities in bci :
- DARPA uses EEG headsets to calm sharp shooters
- fail safe device for pilots -
-
Zeo third qtr this yr they will have an API

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