Can you deliver medical treatment by changing brainwaves instead of injecting drugs?
Elon Musk has recently implanted his first Neuralink into a human patient. But can we get neurotech medical treatment without drilling holes in our skulls?
Maybe …
According to Elemind, a startup with roots in MIT, we can. And they say they can read your brainwaves, manipulate them, and fix issues like sleep disorders, tremors, pain, as well as speeding up learning.
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Today we’re chatting with Meredith Perry, the CEO and former NASA astrobiology Researcher, plus Dr. David Wang, co-founder and CTO, who has a PhD in AI from MIT. This technology could potentially treat medical conditions ranging from sleep disorders and tremors to learning difficulties. We also discuss the future of medtech, envisioning an ‘app store for the brain’ where individualized treatments can be downloaded like apps, focusing on promoting the most optimized state of health for any given individual through real-time detection and diagnosis.
Check out the story on Forbes …
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AI summary and transcript
Summary:
This podcast is a conversation between John Koetsier, the host of TechFirst, and Meredith Perry and David Wang, the CEO and CTO of a neurotech health company called Elemind. They discuss the company’s wearable device that uses neurostimulation to read and stimulate the brain in real time. They talk about the potential of using this device for medical treatment without the need for drugs and its effectiveness in improving sleep, reducing pain, and enhancing learning. They also discuss the future plans of the company, including the development of an app store for the brain and individualized treatments based on AI and machine learning. Overall, the script highlights the innovative technology and potential benefits of this neurotech device.
Transcript:
Meredith Perry: We use a wearable neurotech device to read the brain in real time and intercept it in real time with something called neurostimulation. And so that’s using sound or light or vibration or electricity to stimulate the brain. when we do that, we can actually guide the brain precisely, and that leads to a behavior change.
So like a drug, but much smarter and without the side effects.
John Koetsier: Hello and welcome to TechFirst. My name of course is John Koetsier. Elon Musk has implanted his first Neuralink into a human patient.
Maybe according to LMI to startup with roots in MIT, we can and they say they can read your brainwaves, manipulate them, and fix issues like sleep disorders, tremors, pain, as well as speeding up learning. Today we’re chatting with Meredith Perry, the CEO and former NASA astrobiology Researcher plus David Wang, Dr.
David Wang, co-founder and CTO, who has a PhD in AI from MIT. Welcome both of you.
So
Meredith Perry: nice to be here. thank you so much for having us.
David Wang: Thanks for having
John Koetsier: Super pumped to have you. Meredith, are you sure you didn’t bring something back from outer space?
Meredith Perry: I’ve never been to outer space. but I’d love to bring something back for you if I ever get the privilege to go.
John Koetsier: Give us the big picture. What does lm I do.
Meredith Perry: So M Mind is a Neurotech Health company, and we’ve developed a wearable device that’s going to allow you to optimize and improve your health without the use of drugs. So let me give you some context. So as we know, healthcare today is reactive, it’s blunt, it’s largely dependent on pharmaceuticals.
And while pharmaceuticals can often be effective, we also know that they can sometimes be addictive and they can have negative side effects. So, uh, our co-founders and I have spent the last four and a half years developing a way to achieve the same effects of drugs. Without chemicals and without side effects.
And this approach we call electric medicine. So with electric medicine. We use a wearable neurotech device to read the brain in real time and intercept it in real time with something called neurostimulation. And so that’s using sound or light or vibration or electricity to stimulate the brain. And when we do that, we can actually guide the brain precisely, and that leads to a behavior change.
So like a drug, but much smarter and without the side effects. And there’s a lot other cool things that we can do. Once you have the, uh, once you can insert AI and machine learning and use sensors to be able to even see whether or not something like this is working in the body.
John Koetsier: So when I’m listening to what you’re saying, the picture that comes into my mind is something like some deep sea helmet that I wear on my head. It’s got sensors, it senses my brainwaves, and then it’s got all kinds of equipment on there to influence them.
What is it actually?
Meredith Perry: it is a very simple form factor. When you think of an EEG device, what comes to mind might be some sort of helmet with tons of wires. We have made a very sleek. form factor of something that looks somewhat like a headband, uh, that has a suite of sensors that’s reading what’s going on inside your brain and inside your body.
Um, and we use all of that information to let us know when to stimulate and how to precisely guide the brain to achieve the desired outcome.
John Koetsier: Is that something like a muse headband maybe?
Meredith Perry: today we’re not going to be talking specifically about our other form factor but it is a headband, wearable, and, um, and it will be comfortable and flexible and low profile and easy to move around or sleep with
David Wang: Interesting hint, you can sleep with it. That seems to indicate it is soft or at least somewhat soft. Okay. I won’t dig too much farther on there. I, I appreciate you’ll show it to me when you’re ready. That’s great. how it works has been the focus of our work for the past five years or so.
at the core of LM i’s technology is the ability to predict, When a biological oscillation is going to reach its peak or reach, its troffer, any phase in between. And with this ability to predict we then have the ability to intercede. And Meredith just listed all the different stimulation strategies we used, but fundamentally, you can go back to maybe freshman physics.
we are doing. Constructive and deconstructive interference on your brainwaves. What makes our technology interesting though, is the method in which we do stimulation doesn’t need to be the same electrochemical language that your brain speaks. Fortunately, your brain is wired to sensors all around your body, so if we stimulate those sensors through light, sound, touch, we can drive your brain to.
impact and neuromodulate other brainwaves
John Koetsier: First of all, you’re a funny guy. But secondly, it’s really interesting.
That to impact the brain, you don’t need to make electrical changes upon the brain per se. You simply need to present stimuli to the brain via our normal natural senses and the brain then somehow reacts in how it interprets and that makes a change. The desired changes precisely, precisely.
Meredith Perry: So John, you can think about it kind of like noise cancellation for the brain.
So you know, to, to give you more context, the brain is an electrochemical organ and we can measure brainwave activity on the outside of the brain using something called an EEG. So David talked about biological oscillations. A brainwave is a biological oscillation and different brain states are characterized by different.
Frequencies of brainwaves. And what we’ve learned is that by stimulating at certain parts, uh, at certain. Times relative to the brainwaves.
We can speed up certain, frequencies. We can slow them down. We can amplify or suppress them. This is what neuromodulation is, and we’ve found that by changing the brainwaves themselves, we can actually change the state that someone’s in.
John Koetsier: Again. Fascinating. Really, really cool. You’ve really got me wondering about the form factor here.
I know you’re not talking about that. I’m wondering if it’s like a muse or maybe the neuro from the crown, uh, neuro device. We’ll see when that comes out. I. Uh, talk a little bit about how effective it is. You’ve done, I believe, three studies on it, three published studies. You’ve probably done a lot more work on it.
How effective this if, if my pain is a 10, can you reduce it to a three? Uh, if, if, if I’m having trouble learning, how, how much can you speed that up? What kind of effectiveness data do you have? Yeah, that’s a great question.
David Wang: we’ve done studies in a variety of different areas, which is really cool about our technology.
It is quite broadly applicable. within the area of sleep, we’ve, studied over a hundred subjects. We’ve recorded over two and half years worth of, sleeping data and we’ve shown in the particular case of sleep, that we can help people fall asleep significantly faster for about 73% of our subjects, about 30% faster, which is huge.
we’ve also been working with, All sorts of fantastic academic collaborators. from the University of Washington, we have really amazing work that shows that we can, increase someone’s tolerance to, pain in this case a temperature threshold. quite significantly.
if we stimulate at the correct time, work from Louvin and McGill University has shown that, we can improve, learning and response times, by, stimulating at the correct time. we have a fantastic paper in, nature about two years ago that shows a different form of simulation.
So in this case. electrodes placed on top of the scalp that we have the ability to reduce tremors as well. So for people with physiological shaking, by about 50%, with less than a minute of stimulation.
John Koetsier: That’s huge because, uh, for people who have that, that can be completely debilitating, uh, not able to do anything.
It’s really interesting to me personally about the pain thing. I’ve been told by three doctors that I have a high pain tolerance and I don’t know, I just have this switch I can flip on my brain. I still feel the pain, but I can stop caring about it. I don’t know if your device works that way or how it works.
I mean, you talked about in terms of sleep, you talked about speeding up by 30%, the the time that it took for them to get to sleep. Typically, if there’s something like tremors or other things, and it may be different for different conditions, what’s the treatment time period like?
Meredith Perry: with sleep we see people fall asleep up to 76% faster. the average for that group is 30%. it really can make an enormous difference, the timing of the effect. Depends on the application with tremor, you can actually see a video, of somebody, using LMI to suppress their tremor and you can see the impact instantaneously.
after 30 seconds of stimulation, we see the effect actually grows. But it’s instantaneous. Sleep, you’re not falling asleep instantly. We are accelerating the time that it takes for you to fall asleep. Um, and so, you know, if you normally take 30 minutes to fall asleep, we might help you fall asleep in 15 minutes.
with the pain in that example, the study that we did, we were amplifying, the delta waves that are associated with deep sleep and we could amplify the sedative effect of, an anesthetic. And so we saw that instantaneously too. we were able to effectively, put higher temperature against someone’s skin.
And when you were able to combine Ella mind with the anesthesia people, from that pain. which indicates that we would be able to actually give people less drug, if they were undergoing anesthesia.
John Koetsier: Love it, love it, love it. The scientist is telling me the 30% average, the CEO, who’s already planning the brochure says up to 70%.
Makes total sense. And of
Meredith Perry: we can’t leave money on the table, John. The facts are facts.
John Koetsier: Absolutely. Now, is this gonna be a medical device? Is this gonna be something that you have to. prescribed for, and maybe used in a medical scenario under supervision, or will it be off the shelf?
Buy it at a drug store, use it at home.
Meredith Perry: the first product we go to market with is a consumer wellness product. It’s not a medical device. not FDA approved, and focused on a wellness application. moving forward we will have form factors and models that will be medical devices and will treat medical issues.
John Koetsier: Now you’ve been in stealth since 2019. that’s a decent length of time. It’s a hardware startup, so that’s not easy and takes time. And it’s also cutting edge. It’s new technology that you’re inventing. And by the way, there’s been immense advances in AI in that whole period of time.
And you guys use AI to understand the brain and then, implement your treatments. That’s interesting. It’s also been a crazy period to be installed. You pick the covid and lockdown and shut down and then return and all that stuff. What’s the next few steps? What’s the next couple years look like for you?
Meredith Perry: So, in a number of months we’re going to be announcing our first consumer product. it’s going to focus on one application that we’ve conducted, clinical trials on that we’ve been successful with. a large focus of the company is going to move in that one direction. But after that, our grand vision for this company is to ultimately be an app store for the brain where you can effectively download a treatment, like you download an app from an app store or download a brain state like you download it.
an app from an app store. our technology has capabilities that go far beyond just treatment. So when you, when you’re wearing something, uh, for a significant period of time that has biosensors on it, we can detect or diagnose in real time with the assistance of AI and machine learning.
Whether you have an issue, you know, perhaps you’ve had a stroke or perhaps you’re having a seizure, or we see that you are anxious or potentially have, um, you know, signs of mild cognitive impairment. That’s something that we’re going to be able to tell people. And I. With the use of ai, we’ve also developed a tool that’s going to allow us to learn over time what stimulation protocols will optimize, uh, the, the person’s state, um, the fastest.
And so the vision here is to be able to develop individualized treatments for different people for their different conditions, to allow them to be the most optimized versions of themselves, um, at any given time for whatever those disorders are.
John Koetsier: the mind kind of, uh, explodes here because of course, the whole quantified self comes into play here a little bit.
and when we saw, uh, fitness trackers, the Fitbit was one of the first big ones that came out there. I’ve interviewed somebody who says they’re injuries in the Fitbit for your blood, and you can test like a drop of blood. And it’s not, it was not the one that was a skin. It was more recent than that and see, you know, just what’s happening in terms of what changes, uh, or your diet is impacting everything that you almost think of this as like a Fitbit for the brain or for the mind.
And you almost wonder, will the wearable become something that has fashion aspects so that you could wear it full-time if you wanted to. Perhaps if you’re a high risk individual, you’ve had strokes in the past or something like that, and you want instant awareness of when you’re going to have very early signs of one so you can do something about it.
Uh, wow. Maybe you can build into something like a, a headband or, or glasses or something. Very interesting.
Meredith Perry: Absolutely. and John, I think a key distinction between some of these wearables that you mentioned is that. Almost all of the wearables that exist today just read. They just track. They tell you, things that are happening, but they don’t change anything.
So you can think about us, not as just a tracker, but we read and kind of write. So when we see that a problem that there is a problem, we can also fix that problem, or at least try to, as opposed to telling you, Hey, you should, go for a run or you should do this. we try to meet people where they are and be as simple as a pill.
And a pill doesn’t judge you. A pill doesn’t tell you anything. It just, it does the thing passively for you to get you into the state that you wanna be in.
John Koetsier: I’m returning the Apple watch. It. Can’t do the workout for me. How lame is that? Right? Wow. So lazy, interesting stuff. Very, very cool. I look forward to seeing the device, what it looks like.
I almost wonder if you’d partner with other people. There are so many cool startups in hardware and brain interfaces. I mentioned muse, uh, generosity, uh, is another one. Uh, but this app store for the brain concept. Wow. Uh, and then ideally with some kind of sort of private application of AI to understand my brain, and I’m sure there’s many similarities to everybody’s.
And then there’s some similarities in different types of people whose brains work similarly. But being able to handle that, manage that. and treat that in some level, is very cool.
David, I don’t think you got the off switch yet, do you? I mean, sometimes you just wanna turn the switch off and wake me up in 10 hours and I’ll deal with life at that point.
David Wang: I like to think of the technologies we create as guiding or directing the brain. it gives an individual, more control over themselves, than they would have otherwise.
sometimes we think it’d be great if I just had the willpower to work a little harder, do something more. What if there was a device that gives you that willpower? That’s what we’re trying to enable.
John Koetsier: there’s so much potential for a device that, is not just read, but also write, we give drugs to people who have anxiety.
Right, and it calms ’em down and it has side effects and sometimes their emotions, just flatline. I know somebody very, very well, who has had some schizophrenic episodes and so he has to have treatment for that in the form of pharmaceuticals. And that has almost destroyed his personality and ability to be a functioning spouse and father.
And obviously this is super futuristic, but if you can come up with something that does that non-invasively and very. Intelligently, selectively doing only the things that are required for the condition. And not just totally obliterating somebody’s personality or willpower or motivation
Um, that’s huge. And I’m not even getting into addiction issues where people are addicted to certain feelings or drugs or different things that they get. And being able to address those, is incalculable.
Meredith Perry: We agree and certainly hope so, the way that chemicals work means that they have to go through your entire body to be able to hit its target, which is why there are off target effects.
And with alim mind, we’re interfacing with the brain and the nervous system directly, and we’re not, we don’t have to go through the bloodstream. So we don’t have any of those off target effects. And that’s, and it makes, you know, improving your health, something easy, low effort, and without compromise.
with a drug, we are deciding, okay, I’m gonna take allergy medication, but I know that I’m gonna get groggy. you shouldn’t have to make that trade off.
David Wang: If I could add, we’re all different. When you take a drug, it is like a one pill fits all type of solution, but that’s not actually how humans work.
We are all unique and so there’s an aspect of tailoring and customizing, the neuromodulation, the brain modifications we’re trying to do in order to help some, in some way, that really tailors the effect and minimizes the side effects.
John Koetsier: thank you both for your time.
Thank you so much for having us.
David Wang: Thanks, John.
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