Wearable IoT Neuroflow for treating the PTSD patients. 01-29

A Veteran Entrepreneur

If you can lead soldiers into battle, you can cold call 140 investors.

Neuroflow founder Chris Molaro, WG’17, is a veteran, and he’s seen the effects of PTSD. As he reminds us, “20 veterans a day commit suicide, on average.”

Neuroflow is his way of fighting back. Neuroflow uses wearables to measure the physical effects of stress, and quantify them in a way that is useful to therapists who are treating people for severe anxiety and stress. For the first time, therapists can use quantifiable measurements to see if their therapies are working—and adjust for maximum effectiveness.
The Importance of Persistence

Neuroflow is also a story of persistence. Chris started working with his cofounder, Adam Pardes, who is an engineering PhD candidate at Penn, on a project for the Y-Prize, which asks students to commercialize Penn technologies. In Chris’s words, they “lost miserably.” But the idea was what set them on the path to Neuroflow.

They won the Innovation Prize in the Penn Wharton Startup Challenge, and got a lot of other support from across the University. Chris says that, “before raising the investment capital we won a total of $140,000 in business plan competitions, thanks in large part to Wharton.”
But when they set out to raise serious money, it took time, and a lot of persistence. They ultimately raised $1.25 million. Doing so took them months of conversations, and talks with 140 investors. This, as Karl points out, isn’t especially uncommon—so for you entrepreneurs out there who are looking to raise funds, get ready to start calling.
Our Own Battle

For Chris, he sees Neuroflow as “our own war zone, our own battle, and we have to figure out a way. And we’ve got great men and women to our left and right in the office, and we’ll figure it out.”

What is Neuroflow, 

Originally appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, written by Anna Orso.

When Clark Griswold tried to blanket his home in Christmas lights, an electrical glitch rendered the facade completely dark. But it was his gruff in-laws who added insult to injury. “Beautiful, Clark,” said one. The other called it a “silly waste of resources.”

This is a scene from the 1989 classic National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. But you don’t need to summon Chevy Chase to feel some sort of way at the mere mention of your in-laws.

Finances, gift-giving and, yes, difficult family members all contribute to higher levels of stress during the holiday season. Now, thanks to a Philadelphia startup, there’s an app for that.

A Wharton grad and a Penn Ph.D. student last year founded NeuroFlow, a startup that’s developed software to interpret brain waves and heart rate to measure relaxation and help patients and clinicians visualize how external stressors trigger physical reactions.

The software shows that even the mention of one’s in-laws can set off in some people a physiological response – that gut-level feeling of uneasiness – and can then illustrate exactly how meditation and mindfulness techniques impact the body and brain. But the tool, now in beta and used by a handful of mental health professionals, has applications far beyond the holiday season. Its founders are planning a full launch in February, and believe their platform will ultimately help de-stigmatize mental illness by helping people see it, rather than just feel it.

A lofty goal for a company with eight full-time employees run by a couple of twentysomethings.

“We know it’s a stressful time of year, yet what we found is that the conversation around mental health, around anxiety, around stress is such that there’s this negative stigma,” said CEO and co-founder Christopher Molaro, 29, an Iraq war veteran and Wharton MBA who founded the company in large part to address post-traumatic stress disorder. “I think it’s because if you can’t understand something, measure something, see something, you just push it aside as something that doesn’t exist.”

NeuroFlow is a phone app and cloud-based program that, through bluetooth technology, interprets data to offer digestible information about how relaxed a person is. That data comes from a heart-rate monitor and an EEG (electroencephalogram), in this case a headset, which measures electrical activity in the brain.

The idea is that clinicians would be able to visualize exactly when a patient becomes more stressed, and can then watch in real-time as relaxation techniques like breath monitoring start to actually work. That visualization helps people see mental illness in the same way they can see a broken arm on an X-ray.
Sound complicated? I tried it out this week in a conference room at Benjamin’s Desk, the Center City coworking space where NeuroFlow is based.

Adam Pardes, the company’s 26-year-old co-founder and chief operating officer, helped me put on a headset (similar to the one in the photo above) that retails for about $250. The NeuroFlow program recognized I was wearing the headset, and the line that charted my score on the “relaxation index” was sky high.

Safe to say this reporter is not very relaxed. NeuroFlow confirmed it.

But with the help of a breathing guide that acts a bit like a metronome, I watched the line go down. After just about a minute, I’d gotten into the “relaxation zone,” and I was able to see it.

Other variances in anxiety and stress can be seen with NeuroFlow’s YouTube integration, a tool that allows therapists to show a patient a video – say it’s of a car driving over a bridge for a person who fears that – to see the exact point when a patient’s body goes into anxiety mode.

Using the technology, a patient would also be able to gauge progress with a therapist over time. The tool isn’t meant to replace a mental health professional, though. Think of NeuroFlow more as a thermometer for mental health.

“Your body physiologically changes when you’re more stressed and more relaxed,” Molaro said. “The fact that we can measure and better understand means that you don’t have to be ashamed of it and can go seek help, whether using our platform or not.”

Molaro said NeuroFlow closed its first major funding round in October, raising $1.25 million in venture capital. It’s also supported in part by Penn, where the company is conducting some research through the school’s Neuroscience Initiative.

Sixteen clinicians across the country are currently using NeuroFlow in beta, and the full software will be available for purchase online for about $100 per month.

Molaro and Pardes, who has a background in bioengineering, see a host of applications for clinicians and patients down the line, from testing stress levels in soldiers to tracking mental health in professional athletes to managing that Griswold-level holiday stress.

“Twenty veterans a day killing themselves is unacceptable. Fourteen students at Penn killing themselves is unacceptable,” Molaro said. “My mom crying on Christmas because she’s anxious and stressed out is unacceptable. People deserve better.”

View at the original source

This Tattoo ink changes colour to tell the person, if he/she is dehydrated or diabetic. 10-03

Harvard and MIT researchers have developed smart tattoo ink capable of monitoring health by changing color to tell an athlete if she is dehydrated or a diabetic if his blood sugar rises.
The work, conducted by two postdoctoral fellows at Harvard Medical School and colleagues led by Katia Vega at MIT’s Media Lab, paired biosensitive inks developed at Harvard with traditional tattoo artistry as a way to overcome some of the limitations of current biomedical monitoring devices.
“We were thinking: New technologies, what is the next generation after wearables?” said Ali Yetisen, who is a Tosteson postdoctoral fellow at HMS and Massachusetts General Hospital. “And so we came up with the idea that we could incorporate biosensors in the skin.”


The Dermal Abyss (d-abyss) presents an approach to biointerfaces in which the body surface is rendered as an interactive display by patterning biosensors into the skin to produce color changes in response to biomarker variations in the interstitial fluid. It combines advances in biotechnology with traditional methods in tattoo artistry. d-abyss is designed to use the aesthetics, permanence, and visible nature of tattoos to encode information. In the present work, we replace traditional inks with colorimetric and fluorescent biosensors that can report on the concentration of sodium, glucose, and pH in the interstitial fluid of the skin. We report the preliminary evaluation of these biosensors in an ex vivo skin model, assessing their visibility from the dermis. We describe different applications of d-abyss in the medical, lifestyle, and security domains. This work is a proof of concept of a platform in which the skin reveals information inside the body, tattoos form wearable displays within the skin, and the body's metabolism works as an input for the d-abyss biosensors.

A drawback of current wearable monitoring devices is that they don’t seamlessly integrate with the body, Yetisen said. Short battery life is a concern and so is the need for wireless connectivity, neither of which is an issue with the simple, color-based interface of biosensitive tattoo ink.
“We wanted to go beyond what is available through wearables today,” Yetisen said.

Nan Jiang, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said the project, “Dermal Abyss,” was conducted as a proof of concept, and that further refinements — stabilizing ink so designs don’t fade or diffuse into surrounding tissue — would be needed for a medical product.

The Dermal Abyss tattoo inks change color according to the chemistry of the body’s interstitial fluid, which can be used as a surrogate for constituents of the blood. Inks developed so far change from green to brown as glucose concentration increases. The team also developed a green ink, viewable under blue light, that grows more intense as sodium concentration rises, an indication of dehydration. Researchers tattooed the inks onto segments of pig skin and noted how they changed color or intensity in response to different biomarkers.

Jiang and Yetisen said that once the bugs are worked out, the applications for biologically-sensitive ink are fairly broad. Inks, Yetisen said, could be incorporated into long-lasting tattoos for chronic conditions or into temporary designs for shorter-duration monitoring. Ink can even be invisible, Yetisen said, readable under only particular kinds of light. That light could come from something as ubiquitous as a smartphone.

Yetisen has already developed an app that can analyze a picture of a sensor and provide quantitative diagnostic results. While patients are an obvious potential market, Yetisen said the technology could be used in astronauts, for whom continuous health monitoring is desirable.

Jiang said the project’s purpose was to excite artists and scientists alike about the potential for such technology, and to stimulate discussion of ethical issues it might raise, such as people’s willingness to have health information displayed for all to see.

“The purpose of the work is to light the imagination of biotechnologists and stimulate public support for such efforts,” Jiang said. “These questions of how technology impacts our lives must be considered as carefully as the design of the molecular sensors patients may someday carry embedded in their skin.”





View at the original source

IoT, cloud and Big Data analytics reshape vertical markets 09-07

IoT, cloud and Big Data analytics reshape vertical markets

 

 

The advent of the Internet of Industrial Things (IoIT) has triggered an influx of services such as cyber security and advanced maintenance, and this has dramatically widened business opportunities in the manufacturing services sector, according to a new study from Frost & Sullivan.

As integration with information and communication technologies (ICT) such as big data analytics and cloud-based platforms form the crux of next-generation manufacturing services, solution providers are developing new services that address security and operational improvement as well as maintenance and support, the firm says.

The study, Services 2.0: The New Business Frontier for Profitability, notes that big data analytics is poised to change the maintenance services models across the manufacturing sector.

“In line with the emerging trend of IoIT, manufacturing services are also evolving into a connected ecosystem supported by a single control center,” Srikanth Shivaswamy, Frost & Sullivan industrial automation and process control senior research analyst, said in a statement. “The demand for interoperability and maximum transparency across multiple products and processes is lending credence to the concept of connected operations.”

Such extensive integration will mean high costs for manufacturers, the report says. The convergence of ICT with conventional services will require sophisticated platforms. But the deployment of advanced process controls and smart communication systems will increase efficiency and compensate for the large investments.

Strengthening information security infrastructure, a recent addition to the framework of industrial services, will be vital for the uptake of IoIT-based modules, Frost & Sullivan says. Innovations in investigation, threat detection and self-aware platforms will be critical.

View at the original source

6 reasons why we’re underhyping the Internet of Things 06-25

6 reasons why we’re underhyping the Internet of Things

Just when you thought the Internet of Things couldn’t possibly live up to its hype, along comes a blockbuster, 142-page report from McKinsey Global Institute (“The Internet of Things: Mapping the Value Beyond the Hype”) that says, if anything, we’re underestimating the potential economic impact of the Internet of Things. By 2025, says McKinsey, the potential economic impact of having “sensors and actuators connected by networks to computing systems” (McKinsey’s definition of the Internet of Things) could be more than $11 trillion annually.

According to McKinsey, there are six reasons we may be underhyping the Internet of Things.

1. We’re only using 1 percent of all data

What McKinsey found in its analysis of more than 150 Internet of Things use cases was that we’re simply not taking advantage of all the data that sensors and RFID tags are cranking out 24/7. In some cases, says McKinsey, we may be using only 1 percent of all the data out there. And even then, we’re only using the data for simple things such as anomaly detection and control systems – we’re not taking advantage of the other 99 percent of the data for tasks such as optimization and prediction. A typical offshore oil rig, for example, may have 30,000 sensors hooked up to it, but oil companies are only using a small fraction of this data for future decision-making.

2. We’re not getting the big picture by focusing only on industries

Rather than focusing on verticals and industries (the typical way that potential economic value is computed), McKinsey takes a deeper look at the sweeping changes taking place in nine different physical “settings” where the Internet of Things will actually be deployed – home, retail, office, factories, work sites (mining, oil and gas, construction), vehicles, human (health and wellness), outside (logistics and navigation), and cities. Of that $11 trillion in economic value, four of the nine settings top out at over $1 trillion in projected economic value – factories ($3.7 trillion), cities ($1.7 trillion), health and fitness ($1.6 trillion) and retail ($1.2 trillion).

Thus, instead of focusing on, say, the automotive industry, McKinsey spreads the benefits of the Internet of Things for automobiles over two different physical settings — “vehicles” and “cities.” In the case of vehicles, sensors are a natural fit for maintenance (e.g. sensors that tell you when something’s not working on your car). In the case of cities, these sensors can help with bigger issues such as traffic congestion.

3. We’re forgetting about the B2B opportunity

If you think the Internet of Things is just about smart homes and wearable fitness devices, think again – McKinsey says the B2B market opportunity could be more than two times the size of the B2C opportunity. One big example cited by McKinsey is the ability of work sites to take better advantage of the Internet of Things.

Think of an oil work site, for example. You have machinery (e.g. oil rigs), mobile equipment (trucks), consumables (barrels of oil), employees, processing plants and transportation networks for taking this oil out of the work site. If all those elements are talking to each via the Internet, you can optimize the work site. Oil rigs can let employees know if something’s broken, trucks can arrive on time to pick up the barrels of oil, and then all that oil can be processed and shipped off to wherever it’s needed on time and on schedule.

4. We’re ignoring that “interoperability” could be the new “synergy”

According to McKinsey, approximately 40 percent of the total economic value of the Internet of Things is driven by the ability of all the physical devices to talk to each other via computers — what McKinsey refers to as “interoperability.” You can think of “interoperability” as a new form of synergy – a way to increase the whole without increasing the sum of the parts.

If machines can’t talk to each other, says McKinsey, the Internet of Things might only be a $3.9 trillion opportunity. One example of interoperability is the ability of your brand-new fitness wearable to talk with your hospital or healthcare provider. What good is your fitness device if it can’t communicate with the people who can actually use all that data? With interoperability in health, the Internet of Things may be able to cut the cost of treating chronic disease by 50 percent.

5. We’re underestimating the impact on developing economies

In terms of pure economic impact, there will be approximately a 60:40 split between economic gains for developed economies and developing economies. As McKinsey points out, some of the greatest gains will be in developing nations, especially in areas such as retail. In some cases, developing nations will be able to leapfrog the achievements in developed nations because they don’t have to worry about retrofitting equipment or infrastructure with sensors and actuators.

6. We’re forgetting about the new business models that will be created

It’s not just that the Internet of Things will lead to efficiencies and cost savings – but also that it will lead to entirely new ways of doing business. As McKinsey points out, we will likely see the rise of new business models that correspond with the way we are monitoring and evaluating data in real-time. The line will blur between technology companies and non-technology companies.

For example, take the makers of industrial equipment. Instead of selling expensive capital goods, they will sell products-as-services. Instead of charging one lump sum upfront, they will charge by usage. In addition, there will be new companies that emerge that bill themselves as end-to-end Internet of Things system providers.

**

Obviously, it’s exciting news that the world is about to get an $11 trillion economic shot in the arm from hooking up every possible object to the Internet with sensors and actuators. At the very least, some companies are going to get awfully rich by selling sensors and RFID tags to everyone trying to cash in on the Internet of Things gold rush.

At the same time, though, isn’t there something very bleak about a future in which sensors are hooked up to every object, every setting is predictable and optimized, and pure data guides every decision rather than the human heart? Imagine a giant planned economy, overseen by a bunch of managers schooled in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management, figuring out new ways to crunch the data of our daily lives. When it comes to the Internet of Things, be careful what you wish for.

View at the original source

Wearable Device Helps Vision Impaired Avoid Collision 04-29

Wearable Device Helps Vision Impaired Avoid Collision

People who have lost some of their peripheral vision, such as those with retinitis pigmentosa, glaucoma, or brain injury that causes half visual field loss, often face mobility challenges and increased likelihood of falls and collisions. As therapeutic vision restoration treatments are still in their infancy, rehabilitation approaches using assistive technologies are often times viable alternatives for addressing mobility challenges related to vision loss.

Researchers from Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Schepens Eye Research Institute used an obstacle course to evaluate a wearable collision warning device they developed for patients with peripheral vision loss. They found the device may help patients with a wide range of vision loss avoid collisions with high-level obstacles. Their findings are featured on Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science (IOVS).

“We developed this pocket-sized collision warning device, which can predict impending collisions based on time to collision rather than proximity. It gives warnings only when the users approach to obstacles, not when users stand close to objects and not when moving objects just pass by.

 So, the auditory collision warnings given by the device are simple and intuitively understandable. We tested the device in a density obstacle course to evaluate its effect on collision avoidance in people with peripheral vision loss. To show its beneficial effect, we compared the patients’ mobility performance with the device and without it. 

Just demonstrating the device can give warning for obstacles in walking would not prove the device is useful. We have to compare with a baseline, which is walking without the device in this case.” said the senior author Gang Luo, Ph.D., Associate Scientist at Mass. Eye and Ear/Schepens, and Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School.

Gang Luo, Ph.D., Associate Scientist at Mass. Eye and Ear/Schepens, and Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, adjusts the wearable device that his team created to help those who are visually impaired avoid collision while walking. Image credit: Peter Mallen, Mass. Eye and Ear.

Twenty five patients with tunnel vision or hemianopia completed the obstacle course study and the number of collisions and walking speed were measured.

Compared to walking without the device, collisions were reduced significantly by about 37% with the device and walking speed barely changed. No patient had more collisions when using the device than when not using it.

This video shows a pilot testing of a portable collision device developed for visually impaired. A normally sighted person was wearing a goggle with a small opening, which gave him only 10-deg field of view. A warning device in his pocket gave auditory warnings when imminent collision risk was detected.

“We are excited about the device’s potential value for helping visually impaired and completely blind people walk around safely. Our next job is to test its usefulness in patients’ daily lives in a clinical trial study.” Dr. Luo said.

This video demonstrates an end-user prototype of collision warning device we developed for visually impaired and blind people.

This study is entitled Evaluation of a portable collision warning device for patients with peripheral vision loss in an obstacle course. Other authors are Shrinivas Pundlik and Matteo Tomasi.

View at the original source

The New Analytics Imperative 12-29

The New Analytics Imperative

Cisco today announced a data and analytics strategy and a suite of analytics software that will enable customers to translate their data into actionable business insight regardless of where the data resides.

With the number of connected devices projected to grow from 10 billion today to 50 billion by 2020, the flood tide of new data — widely distributed and often unstructured — is disrupting traditional data management and analytics. Traditionally most organizations created data inside their own four walls and saved it in a centralized repository. This made it easy to analyze the data and extract valuable information to make better business decisions.

But the arrival of the Internet of Everything (IoE) — the hyper-connection of people, process, data, and things – is quickly changing all that. The amount of data is huge. It’s coming from widely disparate sources (like mobile devices, sensors, or remote routers), and much of that data is being created at the edge. Organizations can now get data from everywhere — from every device and at any time — to answer questions about their markets and customers that they never could before. But IT managers and key decision makers are struggling to find the useful business nuggets from this mountain of data.

As an example, take the typical offshore oil rig, which generates up to 2 terabytes of data per day. The majority of this data is time sensitive to both production and safety. Yet it can take up to 12 days to move a single day’s worth of data from its source at the network edge back to the data center or cloud. This means that analytics at the edge are critical to knowing what’s going on when it’s happening now, not almost 2 weeks later.

The case for analytics at the edge is not solely driven by bandwidth constraints. In many cases the data being analyzed simply has a useful life shorter than the time it takes to send the data to a central place for analysis. Location-based information is a perfect example. When someone (or something) is on the move, location-based information is only valid for a brief point in time.  Much of this data today is never analyzed at all because centralized analytics can’t provide insight quickly enough.

This scenario – repeated continuously in companies around the globe – has led to what I call “the Analytics Imperative” – the ability to extract meaning and outcomes in a world where 99.5% of the data collected is never analyzed.

Organizations need new strategies for analyzing these massive data sets. It is no longer viable to move 100% of your data to centralized data stores for analysis, as the examples above illustrate. Instead, customers today need solutions that enable real-time analysis to take place anywhere from the data lake or data warehouse to the edge of the network, including data in motion. The reality of IoE is that turning massive volumes of data into useful information will require analytics from the cloud to the data center to the very edge of the network.

Data and analytics will be the means by which value is extracted from the Internet of Everything. This explains why Cisco has entered the business of data and analytics in a big way with the introduction of Connected Analytics, pre-packaged analytics software ready for integration into existing Cisco infrastructures to enable powerful industry solutions. Why Cisco, you may be asking.

• Connected infrastructure: Only Cisco has the connected infrastructure from the cloud to the data center to the edge to enable analytics everywhere
• Agile pervasive data access: market-leading data virtualization capabilities  to leverage even the most distributed data

• Real-time, streaming analytics at the edge: streaming analytic capabilities built right into our industrialized routers

• The ability to leverage your existing infrastructure:Distributed analytics can be done either in NEW infrastructure or in EXISTING infrastructure. Using the intelligent Cisco infrastructure already in place dramatically reduces deployment and ongoing costs and significantly decreases time to deploy

• Deep domain infrastructure expertise:  Nobody can understand network data better than Cisco; pairing that data with enterprise data can provide insights that aren’t possible without the network data, and THAT is where Cisco has created strength in our analytics.

• Intercloud integration of private/public
•  clouds:

• Enables organizations to draw insights from data stored in both private and public cloud environments

• Broad ecosystem of partners: 

• Strategic partnerships have been critical to Cisco’s success over the past 30 years and continue to be so in the data and analytics space; from Hadoop partners to analytics partners, our customer solutions leverage a full stack of best-of-breed technologies from Cisco and our partners

Cisco approaches big data and analytics in a way no other company can, leveraging our strengths in hardware, software, services, and partnerships to embed powerful analytic capabilities from the data center to the cloud to the edge, providing insights across the most distributed and remote data.

The Analytics Imperative? We get it. And we are here to help you extract value from your data in ways no other vendor can. To learn more about Cisco Connected Analytics for the Internet of Everything, visit this site.

View at the original source