Bypass Typing To Transfer Your Thoughts Directly To Computer [Interview]

In this interview with Ivo de la Rive Box, co-founder and CEO of MindAffect we explore the advances in Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) and how it can be used to allow locked-in patients to interact with their surroundings and communicate with their loved ones.

Tell us a bit about yourself and about your Company? 

In 2016 prof. Peter Desain won the ALSA Prize4Life, which has as a purpose to make inventions/research reach ALS patients. To do so, the researcher has to leave the university, and together with HealthTech Venture builder, in our case NLC.health; they set-up an agreement to spin-out the technology from the university, and start a venture.

Whereas the initial goal was to use the technology to help locked-in patients communicate again, it was clear from the start that it would be too small of a niche to justify all product development. So when I led the effort to start a company, attract, find and build a team, we added the aim of developing a generic BCI-methodology that could be used for many different purposes, while still focusing on assisting locked-in patients as a first proof so that the technology becomes robust enough to leave the lab.

We have now reached the point that the first patient is using the technology daily, while we as a company have distilled the essential parts into a development kit, allowing others to either make a tailored solution for patients, do research, educate or just play around with the tech.

MindAffect provides a headset that measures electrical brain activity. Through visually directing one’s attention at specifically designed stimulus, such as the special keyboard, the BCI matches the brain signals with the stimulus. This allows you to spell letter by letter with your brain.

What brought you in this field? 

I was a co-founder of the previously mentioned HealthTech venture builder, but more interested in the early-stage venturing parts than in managing the process of selecting inventions. After I had sold and left my previous venture, a smart thermostat company, my friends at NLC saw my background in leading a software company that needed to get involved with hardware in order to be able to offer a real product. They asked whether this was the kind of technology I wanted to work on.
Although I was working on a very different plan, I was intrigued by us humans already being able to command computers with brain signals and liked the fact that while searching for a business model, I would at least help people with a big need. My wife then convinced me that I had to stop rationalizing the choices at hand and go for it.

In your opinion what is the field of Brain Computer Interfaces about? 

To me, it is about getting meaningful signals out of our brains to interact with a computer.

That still leaves a lot of options open about its exact meaning, but at least I would like to eliminate relatively random signals interpreted in some way to make it seem there is some causality between how the brain is acting and what the computer does as a response.

What are some challenges you face with the emerging technology? 

As probably with every emerging technology, it is not easy to build a cohesive story around the promise from scientists to what the technology will be able to do, versus the reality of engineers and what the same technology can currently do, not avoiding the expectations of the users or investors you have been selling the promise towards. So, every day we have to face the reality that we have to do cutting-edge work with limited budgets while delivering less in time than we had hoped for. Then you need to go out again to find more funds, while as humans, we cannot yet conceive how it will influence our life in about a decade, but that reality is not helping your pitch.

How do you explain your product to the public? 

Picturing the feeling of being locked-in, is so overwhelming to anyone, yet explaining how you can communicate again by wearing a brain-sensing headband and having a ‘speller-app’ immediately activates the imagination.
However, it is only part of our story, and we have to be honest that by lack of a scalable use-case for healthy people at the moment, we overuse the locked-in case in relation to how many people we can really help, or how much time we spend on really helping them.

How far are we from getting this technology into the hands of the users? 

Whereas the first locked-in patient is using it since September last year, anyone can now order a dev.kit on KickStarter, and should then be able to play with the technology by the end of March.

What does it take for this technology to become practically in the hands of the public? 

Now, whether a technology is available to the ‘maker-space’ is the same as being in ‘the hands of the public’ is another thing. My feeling is that the evolution of our work and that of other start-ups like ours will ultimately lead to consumer products in this decade. But for that to happen, it means that a corporate player commits significant resources for at least three years earlier, with pilot projects before that. We are now working on all the experimentation to get people to imagine such pilots.
So, yes, there will be early VR games or AR glasses with brain control, and needy patients will be helped, but I do think we are still quite some years away from the technology being in the hands of the larger public.

How do you envision its implementation in our daily lives? 

When I told my seven years old daughter about what I was going to do by setting up this venture, she immediately responded: “Ahh, so I could then switch the channels of the TV without even pushing a button”. I grew up walking to a TV to change the channel, so I do honestly feel limited in envisioning the exact use-cases. Maybe also because of having had the previous experience of seeing how wrong we all were in predicting how we would use internet-connected phones at the end of the last century. That was a previous step in enhancing our bodies with a computer in our pocket.
But the impact on our brain of being able to command an outside assistant to help out instantly will surely liberate much creativity in the generation of our kids, and they will find the real use.

What features and benefits will your product bring to the consumers? 

For the coming years, it will mostly bring benefits to disabled people who have not found solutions by using the currently available technologies like eye tracking, voice control, or simple switches: both for communication and environment controls. This can have a significant impact on those people and their loved ones with whom they live.

What problem will this product solve? 

Except for the case mentioned above, we cannot deny that we have a solution looking for a problem. But in looking for it, we productize our own research and enable others to start from the point that we have reached.

I think progress in BCI research has been hampered by lots of small teams sitting on their work instead of sharing solutions for others to improve. I believe that by collaborating, we all have a good chance of succeeding.

Where do you see the product in few years from now? 

I am still resisting to adopt reading glasses, but I see myself wearing a nice light pair in a couple of years, with some sorts of menus and pop-ups that I can select with my brain: no need for voice-control, gestures or some sort of wireless mouse to get more info on what I see or to get incoming messages.

Is the market large enough? Are there competitors? 

Our original assumption that the market of locked-in patients was too small to justify product development has been more than validated.

Research, education and hobbyism on cool technology, however, should be able to justify work on the current scale.
But then there is the human desire to go for new frontiers. There does not necessarily need to be a clear market yet, for many people to venture into the field. So, yes, we could consider companies like Next Mind and Neurable as competitors, but them winning a contract likely gives us a better chance to win one with someone else. We are all doing our small bits in creating a market.

Would the product be influenced by others markets and why? 

I hope it does: we might then actually use it to solve a real, current problem. If all attention is on ‘disruption’ rather than creating fully new stuff, it is because there is an existing market that you can get a share of. That helps to fund your work.

Will you give us a closing remark and areas of improvements? 

The research on BCIs is already out there for quite some time, but for BCIs to be used effectively and by a significant part of the population, we still need a lot of hard work, from a wide variety of different talents. Whereas a lot of hard-core engineering is needed, the success will ultimately come from inviting designers, early users, and non-technical entrepreneurs to the table.

If Gartner predicts BCIs to fall into the ‘trough of disillusionment’ pretty soon, we should not let negative sentiments influence ourselves, but understand that there is a lot of hard work still to be done, to ultimately earn the respect of normal users for our products.

What are you reading right now? 

Besides trying to get through the Economist every week, I progress slowly on three fronts: ‘Gods and Robots’ from Adrienne Mayor, ‘More from Less’ from Andrew McAfee and ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ from Walter Isaacson.

Support MindAffect brain computer interface on @kickstarter

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Originally published at https://www.saintrino.org