Neurable had a vision to create a net-new product leveraging EEG sensors to track brainwaves. The product is based on years of scientific research and R&D – they chose Intent as a technological partner to help conduct detailed user research and to create a mobile app to interface with this new technology. We caught up with Jamie Alders, Vice President of Product at Neurable, to chat to him about their product vision at the start.
What was your background before joining Neurable?
What was your background before joining Neurable?
I’m a mechanical engineer by training. When I graduated college, I went to work at BOSE for product design and mechanical design for headphones, speakers, etc.
Just when I decided I did not want to be an engineer my entire career, I went to get my MBA – I ended up going back to BOSE for product strategy. I was an engineer at BOSE for 5 years, and a product manager for 7. At the end, I focused a lot on partnerships, working with Spotify on the integration of music services into Wi-Fi speakers.
My last project was integrating Alexa into speakers and headphones, and this is when I saw the impact of this new technology – how people’s behavior changed when Alexa, Google Assistant, and similar tools came into the scene.
And so I was looking for new projects when the Alexa project was coming to a close, I felt it was time to move on and do something else. That’s how I came across Neurable, and saw how brainwave sensors, BCIs, and EEG had a similar potential to change the landscape of how we interact with our devices.
That must have been pretty exciting! Entering into a lot of unknowns?
Yeah, exactly!
Also, I experienced what it was like to be at a large organization, and I wanted to see what it was like to work at a smaller one.
What was your vision of Neurable from the start?
When I joined, Neurable had a bit of a different focus, it was mostly centered around gaming. Before my time, they had built a VR headset with EEG sensors on the back of the head strap and created a game demo – you could pick up items and throw them using your “mind”, which was great!
But at the time that was introduced in 2017, VR was more ‘hype’. We quickly realized that VR has a lot of problems to solve before they’d be ready to incorporate Neurable’s technology.
Before I joined, Neurable started to use the same technology to understand cognitive states and the overall patterns in the brain for the purpose of maintaining focus, managing fatigue, and human performance.
I was brought in because I had experience in hardware, headphones, and consumer electronics. The original vision I had was to take these huge and clumsy sensors and turn them into a good experience for everyday people.
Do you think in the future we’ll interact with devices through brainwaves?
I don’t think it’s the only way, I think it’s supplemental. As of now, we don’t only interact with devices through voice control – we also use keyboards and touch screens, and sometimes when it’s appropriate we use voice control.
I think there are three layers here. One is context – making your devices a little bit more aware of what’s going on in terms of relaxation, stress, fatigue, etc. So, in a factory measuring fatigue would be very helpful for a machine to adapt to the operator, or a pilot entering a cockpit.
For people like us, that might be adapting our content and experiences to our cognitive state. This is what we call ‘effective computing’ which is using the context of what’s happening in your brain to give you a better experience.
Then there’s another element: device control, which will take many different forms. There are things you can do to detect eye movement and facial movements to drive some control, and there’s brain control, which will come later.
The third layer is focused on health. Looking at brain patterns over time, EEG can be used to detect if it’s likely that a person has a condition like ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, among others, and provide feedback during treatment. There are lots of different use cases, it’s just about advancing the right ones at the right time.
So this technology could really improve people’s lives in a tangible way?
Yes, absolutely! We’re really excited about the potential.
What do you see as the main USP for your product?
What we’re focusing on now is a short-term, tangible benefit that we can deliver with the technology we have now, which is headphones for focus. They help people with their performance at work, address the problem of workplace burnout and fatigue, and give them the tools to get more data and make better decisions about how they work.
That’s the first step. The good news is that those headphones, the same tech, can be used for lots of other applications. Once we collect more data and are able to get insights based on it, then we could add more to the product.
Privacy has always been a concern when it comes to this type of technology. Do you think there’s a solution on the horizon that would assure people that their data is used properly?
There are two sides to this issue: people’s perception and reality. Both are very important.
Neurable has always been at the forefront of neuroethics. We’ve talked openly about how we’re never going to sell anyone’s data. We want to create products that help the end users benefit rather than take their data for someone else to benefit from it. We intend to be very transparent about what we use the data for and to assure that it is used for the right purposes.
The reality is that the data that the headphones actually collect is not much different from collecting heart rate data – we’re not reading people’s thoughts. Instead, the data informs the general trends of how your brain reacts to something. When you exercise and your heart rate goes up, a fitness tracker detects that change. Similarly, when you are engaged in deep work, Neurable’s technology detects the change in how your brain responds.
How has Intent helped you overcome challenges regarding wearable technology?
The key thing that Intent has helped us with is the fact that, while we’re experts in brainwaves and machine learning, we are not experts in building mobile applications, backend systems, or developing software for Bluetooth devices. It’s not our core, and I think Neurable and Intent have done a lot of novel things to adapt Intent’s knowledge to our particular application.
That’s where Intent has really helped because Intent knows how to build the types of applications Neurable doesn’t and Intent has done it before. Thanks to Intent, Neurable can focus on improving our core technology and Intent can focus on app development.
Wojciech Spychalski
Head of Marketing
