Layla Laidouci spoke with Kurt Haggstrom, chief commercial officer at Synchron, about bringing thought into home control via the newly Alexa-compliant brain computer interface (BCI).
Kurt Haggstrom has worked in the medical device industry for over twenty years, unravelling the mysteries of the mind to find a solution to motor transmission difficulties. Now his expertise is part of an interplay of science and technology at the US-based company Synchron, a start-up aiming to take an implantable brain computer interface (BCI) out of the abstract realm and into the market.
Resembling a small mesh tube, the Synchron BCI is covered with electrodes to detect neural signals and can be fitted in the brain’s motor cortex in a minimally invasive procedure. Since the company’s inception in 2012, the implant has shown market scalability at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons and partnered with consumer technologies to deliver home control for trial participants. One patient fitted with the device, referred to as Mark, successfully used Amazon Alexa entirely hands-and-voice free in a story covered online by HiddenWires.
Haggstrom says: “We've put together a team of world experts to develop hardware and software integration around brain function and for the first time, the concept has moved past the research phase. We're taking the blood vessels - the circulatory system, the most nutrient rich system indoor organ available – to support this device and apply thought to digital action.”
Dr Thomas Oxley, CEO of Synchron, sparked considerable Orwellian unease during his 2018 TED Talk when he likened the BCI to a form of telepathy. On the contrary, Haggstrom explains that the BCI is one of “the most secure” technologies available, co-existing with privacy and personalisation in the home.“We think of security via our biomarkers such as fingerprints and retinas, things unique to us,” he says. “The one thing that's not static, however, is your thought. It is probably one of the most secure things available, unable to be copied because it’s moving and transmitting a neuro signal as a biomarker over time. Now we have a hardware that can sense and probably stimulate. We could see the connection evolve between wheelchairs, feeders and robotics in the future, restoring capability to these users and providing new daily living functions for the supercomputer.
"There are even BCI companies specifically dealing with speech. We can think about the mechanical movement of speech as something to be digitised and connected to a voice – it’s something that's been shown to be done. There's some research out there and that's absolutely another direction for BCI.
“Our quality statement is that we're trying to design a product that we'd be willing to put in our loved ones. There’s a lot of attention and that's what takes so much time: the rigour that goes into testing and ensuring this product's ready to be put in a human. Those results [at the Congress] were the first ever to show a long-term implantable trial delivering evidence of safety and efficacy. We still have a couple more studies to go before going to market, but it was an amazing moment to take that next step for the industry.”
Guests at the Congress included Elon Musk, who spoke on behalf of his BCI enterprise Neuralink which has drawn significant press attention. Haggstrom and the team at Synchron are driving seismic change without being seen and heard in quite the same way. Has the assisted living challenge been taken seriously by the industry up until now, and what has the response been like to Synchron’s uniquely consumer-friendly BCI?
“For 20 years, BCI has been in a research environment of PHDs and complex computer systems to understand and decode what’s going on in thought,” answers Haggstrom. “When you want to make a product for real-world application, it must work out-of-the-box. The first evolution needs to be highly functionable, simple to use, not complex: our product concept rallies a community of people and patients behind it, including medical societies and advocacy groups for those with injury or illness. We have a close relationship with the FDA and have set up a registry for people to keep tabs on our upcoming trials. The groups are behind us and want us to win: the more unanimous the voice, the more likely the public will say ‘we get it'.
Haggstrom with the BCI
“If you look at the populations that have motor needs, they're smaller than that consumer world we associate with the giant corporations. Yet the Alexa team are as passionate as we are about improving lives in every way possible with these technologies. The product concept is a collaborative process – as we think about development, we are part of a constant feedback loop reviewing everything from technical bugs to neural compatibility. For example, we’ve designed the BCI so it can now integrate into the Alexa environment, following the same control principles that govern a computer mouse or keyboard.
“As we evolve, I look forward to conceptualising things that people haven't seen before. When you think of a keyboard or a mouse, it's based on touch at different speeds. We’re now asking the question: can we navigate the digital world differently, faster, perhaps even more securely, with neural versus physical control? There may be different ways to think about integration with apps and systems because of direct-thought-to-digital environments.”
Haggstrom’s vision of the BCI over the next decade is far-reaching and democratic. He closes: “You think this is a specialised procedure, but the techniques needed for our technology are off-the-shelf and standardised. I would love to be impacting hundreds of thousands of lives with this technology, not just in the States but globally. We want to make sure that the world has this in an equitable way. We can't launch a product like this for a select few that can afford it: we aim to make this affordable in the next ten-year window, for the hundreds of thousands or maybe millions that need it.”
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