Technology that lets 'locked-in' syndrome sufferers communicate makes Invent 2015 shortlist

                   

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The finalists have been selected in the Invent 2015 competition, which aims to turn the best innovations into businesses

By Margaret Canning – 01 June 2015

Wearable technology enabling sufferers of 'locked-in' syndrome to communicate by translating their brainwaves is among the finalists in a competition to find our best inventions.

 

Dr Damien Coyle from NeuroConcise has been working on his innovation for 15 years - and now it's one of 12 to make it through to the final of the Invent 2015, a programme run by the Northern Ireland Science Park.
The Londonderry man said: "NeuroConcise will benefit people who have no means of communication whatsoever.
"A lot of them have been in a so-called "locked-in" state or in some cases, people don't even know if they are aware of their surroundings or not. Our technology will first of all provide clarity around their awareness and secondly, offer them a movement-free communication channel."
The technology can non-invasively measure and translate brainwaves into control signals, allowing people to communicate and interact without moving.
Dr Coyle had to pitch his technology to a team of entrepreneurs to be in with a chance of winning a position on the NI Tech Mission to California, a share of the £33,000 prize fund, as well as mentoring, networking and business development from the NI Science Park's NISP Connect.
The final of the programme will take place in October - but last Thursday night, 24 hopefuls had to present their concept, before facing questions from the judges.
Other finalists who emerged from Thursday night's event include Chirag Gujral of Queen's University, who has discovered a method of reducing the effects of eye diseases, and brothers from the north coast who have used their love of surfing to set up their own surfboard company Skunkworks.
The animal world is also represented by EquiNutritive Equi-Liquid Gold - an anti-inflammatory supplement for horses which helps their general well-being.
Alexandra Frazer from Equi-liquid Gold said: "I'm looking forward to what's to come over the next few months in the lead-up to the final.
"I definitely want to tap into the export markets and expand with other product ranges and become a leader in the equine supplement industry. It's a long road ahead but this competition is definitely an amazing step up the ladder for new technologies."

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Organiser Peter Edgar said: "QuickPitch is the semi-final stage of Invent, which is all about telling the story of a breakthrough idea which has the potential to change an industry or solve a global problem which can make people's lives better. It's fast and exciting."
Julie Ann O'Hare, director of business banking at Bank of Ireland UK, which sponsors Invent 2015, said: "I congratulate all 24 finalists on their excellent pitches and encourage them to stick with it."

This smartphone connects for those with disabilities

Via CBS

ByAmy LangfieldMoneyWatch

 

 

Sesame Enable co-founder and CEO Oded Ben Dov (right) with a user of the company's smartphone. Basti Hansen                

 

In some quarters, the growth of the smartphone market may finally be slowing, but it's just getting started elsewhere.
Sesame Enable, a company that modifies smartphones so that people with disabilities can control a cursor with only slight head movements, just shipped its first 50 phones, said Oded Ben Dov, the Israel-based company's co-founder and CEO.
That means people with spinal cord injuries, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, muscular dystrophy, severe arthritis and other conditions can now make unassisted phone calls, check email, play Angry Birds and just about anything else a typical smartphone addict does daily.
All they need to do is say "Open Sesame" to turn the phone on, and then look at the phone's screen so its camera can capture slight left and right head movements.
About 2 million people in the U.S. could benefit from such a device, Ben Dov said. The market is indeed large. All told, about 6 million Americans live with some form of paralysis, according to Peter Wilderotter, president and CEO of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.
"Smarter devices that can be activated by voice, vision or slight movement have the potential of transforming many lives, increasing independence, access and communication," he said in an email.

Basti Hansen

The foundation has already been in touch with Sesame Enable and has been keeping tabs on other companies investing in related technologies, such as Nokia (NOK), Samsung, Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT).
"Other tech trends that will benefit individuals living with disabilities include the connected home -- or smart home. As an emerging innovation, there are a number of players at the table from Verizon (VZ) to AT&T (T), Samsung, GE (GE) and even Google (GOOG)," Wilderotter said.
Sesame Enable's other co-founder, Giora Livne, was also its first customer. An ex-navy officer and electrical power engineer, Livne is now a quadriplegic as a result of a fall off a ladder. The co-founders started the work with their own money, and received $215,000 from an Israeli Office of the Chief Scientist matching grant and an angel investor.
From there, they launched a $30,000 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, which turned into gravy once they won the $1 million Verizon's Powerful Answers Award and then $100,000 from Michael Bloomberg's Genesis Prize.
They're not courting the venture capital market at this point, in part so they aren't pressured to focus on developing the technology for games or another larger market.
"I really think our focus on the disability market is also the right thing to do morally, and also from the business angle were building on a very solid need," Livne said.
With the unexpected Verizon grant in hand, they were able to give away 23 of the first phones. "We decided to donate all funds raised on Indiegogo -- past, present and future -- toward devices that will go to people in need," Ben Dov says in his updated video on the crowdfunding site. People who want to buy a smartphone directly can also purchase one on the site for $700.

Basti Hansen

Currently the phone is only available as a Google (GOOG) Nexus 5, but the company is working on other models, including tablets, Ben Dov said. The Sesame Enable technology is something of a cross between an app and an operating system, and can be used with almost any app in the Google Play store. They're working on integrating with Google Now personal assistant and a voice command that will allow users to dictate emails rather than tap out text on a keyboard with the head-controlled cursor.
Now that Sesame Enable has gone from futuristic prototype to Version. 1.0, users are offering feedback and are anxious for more.
"What really surprised me, the questions were already into the experience: 'How do you do this, how do you change that?'" Ben Dov said. "We got the 'Oh my god, this is amazing!' six months ago when we had the crowdfunding campaign. Someone had said he's been waiting for this technology for the past 15 years. 'You have no idea what you've done. It's like you've opened the Matrix.' But we're past that excitement, and now it's: Let's get down to business."

Great advances being made in assistive technology

As one researcher notes, “I think we’re in the middle of a revolution in technology for people with impairments.”

By: Kate Allen Science and Technology reporter, Published on Sun May 31 2015

    

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Pizza delivery apps. Fitness trackers. Dashboard GPS. Often, technology makes life easier for people whose lives are already very easy.

But what about next-generation wheelchairs or 3D-printed prosthetics?

In the field of assistive technology, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs are also making life easier for people with disabilities, chipping away at truly big problems at steady pace. Their successes are likely to accelerate.

“I think we’re in the middle of a revolution in technology for people with impairments,” says David Reinkensmeyer, a biorobotics researcher at the University of California, Irvine.

“This field, from when I started 15 years ago until now, has really seen an attraction of younger people wanting to get involved,” says Alex Mihailidis, a University of Toronto professor who holds a chair in rehabilitation technology.

“People are seeing this as a challenging and exciting application.”

Richard Lautens

Wire inputs used in a video game that helps Parkinson's patients retain their ability to speak clearly. Users attach sensors to their mouths and then control a dragon that lights trees on fire.

Yet these researchers are often confronted with hurdles that designers of mainstream tech — whether silly or genuinely useful — are not: regulatory barriers, marketplace fragmentation, and even our own unconscious biases.

 

Growing up in Alberta, Gary Kurek was a high school science-fair phenom, ranking provincially, nationally and internationally. In his senior year, after watching his grandmother struggle with the effects of cancer, he set out to build a better wheelchair.

 

His novel design piqued the interest of Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, who chose Kurek for a prestigious $100,000 Thiel Fellowship for entrepreneurs under 20. Among other mobility devices, Kurek built a wheelchair that could climb stairs.

 

But he eventually dropped the project, in large part due to regulatory struggles.

 

“We got really bogged down . . . It was going to take a ton of money and a ton of time,” he says. The market for his product wasn’t big enough to justify the investment. Though he would like to come back to mobility products, Kurek is now working on automated manufacturing.

 

Because many assistive technologies fall under the banner of medical devices, they must be approved by oversight bodies such as Health Canada or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Those in the field acknowledge that safety is paramount, but say the process can sometimes stifle innovation: it is lengthy, costly, and “still quite prohibitive to a lot of startups,” says Mihailidis. “That’s one of the big next hurdles we need to tackle as a field.”

 

Compounding that problem, the market for assistive technologies is highly fragmented, even though it is large and growing rapidly with the aging populations of most developed countries.

 

“For sure there’s a big, big need ... but the market is pretty heterogeneous, in the sense that there are a vast numbers of impairments that cause disabilities to arise,” says Melanie Baljko, a York University professor who specializes in assistive technology.

 

“Everyone experiences their impairment differently.”

 

Even reaching those consumers is a challenge. Many people who need these products don’t buy them directly: insurance companies, caregivers and clinicians all act as mediators.

 

At the same time, other technological advances have begun to carve new pathways forward. The advent of 3D printers, Baljko and Mihailidis both note, has fuelled a thriving DIY culture where designs for items like modified light switches and spoons are shared openly online, circumventing the need for a traditional marketplace and allowing for low-cost customization.

 

“This is really putting the power of technology development into the hands of people who know best,” Baljko says.

 

Other general advances have spurred assistive tech too: the price of sensors is dropping, and machine-learning algorithms are only getting smarter. Smartphones and tablets have created a platform for the proliferation of interactive games that help people with challenges.

 

Shifting social attitudes have also helped. “It’s becoming increasingly socially acceptable to have technology on your body — Apple Watch for example,” says Reinkensmeyer. “We’re all just using technology to enhance our abilities.”

 

But attitude is the most invisible barrier for assistive tech, he adds. “You know what holds us back? The attitude the people can’t: ‘You can’t have a spinal cord injury and play basketball, or ski . . . ’ How long did that societal attitude hold back the development of technologies?” he asks. “We don’t even know what our assumptions are.”

 

For Kate Allen, writing about assistive technologies hits home

Here is a typical email from my Dad, who has Parkinson’s disease:

               

Peter Allen chats with Yana Yunusova, a U of T professor of speech language pathology who is beta-testing a video game that helps Parkinson's patients.

 

   

“Kate I hope that your gum problem has lessened and then you I know a virtuous Flossie — try this again — and that you are a virtuous Flossie to Flossie newsflash to the Flossie Turley — what I’m trying to say is if you have seen the error of your ways and now floss your teeth regularly — my God!, It said what I wanted to thank you for his time to say goodbye.”

 

In case you couldn’t tell, he’s trying to urge me to floss better (I’m 30, for the record). But the voice-recognition software he uses — designed to circumvent his shaky hands — clearly had other ideas.

My English-professor father sent the garbled email for hilarity’s sake, as he often does. I forwarded to my brother for laughs and forgot about it. But a few weeks later when I was aflutter over a new app that offers on-demand lunch delivery, I stopped and thought: this is ridiculous. Why are so many people trying to make it easier for me to buy a sandwich, when it was already really, really easy for me to buy a sandwich? How many people are trying to “disrupt” the crappy technology available to my Dad, who actually needs it?

Richard Lautens / Toronto Star Order this photo

Peter Allen, who has Parkinson's disease, poses with his daughter, Kate, for a selfie with sensor wires hanging out of his mouth. Researchers at the Toronto Rehab Institute are beta-testing a video game that helps Parkinson's patients retain their ability to speak clearly.

  

In the course of trying to answer that question, I stumbled across a fascinating new study led by scientists at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. The research team, led by University of Toronto speech-language pathology professor Yana Yunusova, is testing whether using video games to visualize speech therapy exercises will be more effective at helping Parkinson’s patients improve their characteristically slurred speech. Users repeat tongue-twisters with electromagnetic sensors in their mouths, and the better they do, the more fire a virtual dragon spits out, burning down a stand of trees.

 

My Dad was game. We showed up the TRI on a Tuesday morning, and the team carefully wired him up. “Super Sue sat sewing,” he said over and over again.

 

He found the process frustrating — “They have a strange idea of what a game is, I must say,” he wrote me later — but recognized the importance of what the scientists were trying to accomplish, and will return to be a full participant in the trial.

As I discovered, it’s just a lot harder to bring assistive technology to market than it is to build an Uber for sandwiches or an app that only says “Yo.” But it’s not for lack of a community of people who care deeply, and who are working extraordinarily hard.

Four Novel Assistive Technologies

AT-Knee

Patrick Brown/Panos

The AT-Knee offers a unique balance between stability, durability and motion to mimic the movement of a natural knee. 

   

Engineered by researchers in the Bloorview Research Institute at Toronto’s Holland Bloorview rehabilitation hospital and backed by Grand Challenges Canada, AT-Knee’s designers spent years studying how to make it as biomechanically efficient as possible, with a novel locking mechanism that mimics the stability of real knees.

 

While the trend in prosthetics has been toward high-tech robotics and motorization, LegWorks’ chief technology officer Jan Andrysek notes that the bulk of lower-limb amputees live in countries and communities where such expensive technology is out of reach.

 

“We came up with very simple concept that provided the function that we need,” said Andrysek. After rounds of clinical testing in Chile, Tanzania, Burma, Canada, and elsewhere, LegWorks is aiming for widespread adoption: “we’re trying to be everywhere.”

Swizzle Shave

University of Toronto

A team of University of Toronto engineering undergraduates designed this razor to accommodate the jerky movements of Huntington’s disease patients. It is a finalist in the 2015 Innovative Designs for Accessibility, a competition for Ontario university students. Michelle Samfira, a co-creator, called the team’s work “really rewarding.”

Music Glove

Courtesy of Flint Rehabilitation Devices

The sensor-filled glove is designed to by worn by stroke patients and played with a game that works a lot like Guitar Hero. The system coaxes stroke survivors to use the kind of hand movements that will help them regain dexterity. It was created by Nizan Friedman, a former graduate student in the lab of University of California, Irvine’s David Reinkensmeyer.

Brian

University of Toronto

Professor Goldie Nejat, who directs the Autonomous Systems and Biomechatronics Laboratory at U of T’s Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, designed Brian, a socially assistive robot. Using machine learning, Brian can talk and joke, and is designed to help cognitively impaired seniors accomplish tasks like finishing meals or taking medication on time.

Medicare Coverage of Speech Generating Devices (SGD)

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued a number of different policy changes regarding coverage for speech generating devices (SGDs) that have created some confusion and raised significant concerns within the ALS community. The ALS Association’s Public Policy Department has worked on these issues since they first arose and continues to advocate to ensure that people with ALS have access to communications devices that are so vital to living with this disease. The issues are summarized below and include what action The Association is taking and what people with ALS can do to help.

Capped Rental:

Beginning on April 1, 2014, Medicare is changing how it pays for SGDs, switching to a system called “capped rental.” Since 2001, people with ALS always have had the option of renting SGDs; however the overwhelming majority purchases them. Beginning on April 1, people no longer will have that option. Instead, they will be required to rent the device over a 13 month period. During the capped rental period, people with ALS will be contacted each month by the manufacturer to ask whether the SGD will be needed during the next month. As long as the answer is yes, the patient can keep the device. After the 13th month, these monthly questions about further use will stop and the patient will own the device. The payment system change does not apply to anyone on Medicare who currently owns an SGD. Capped rental also does not affect which devices Medicare will cover, or the evaluation and documentation required to support Medicare coverage.
The ALS Association has been actively engaged on this issue since CMS first proposed the change in the summer of 2013. We have submitted formal comments to CMS and have partnered with other organizations, those in industry and with Members of Congress who share our concerns to urge CMS not to make this change. Our concerns are outlined in the comments to CMS, here http://bit.ly/1h2e2X8. They include:

• Access: If people have an extended hospital stay or are in hospice while they are in the rental period, Medicare will not cover the rental fees. Instead, the device could be returned to the manufacturer while the patient would have to obtain a new one from the hospital or hospice or pay the entire monthly rental fee out-of-pocket.
• Cost: People who rent SGDs for the full 13 month rental period will pay 5% more out of pocket than if they had purchased the device up front. Most recently, several Members of Congress sent a letter (http://bit.ly/1lX98PA) to CMS urging them to: 1) delay the implementation date; 2) reevaluate the data on which their decision was based (CMS relied on 1987 claims data); and 3) meet with stakeholders. A number of meetings have taken place with CMS and a number of scenarios are possible. Those include:
• Full implementation on April 1
• Delay implementation
• Grandfather certain DME introduced to the market after 1987
• Grandfather all SGDs since the devices are not intended for short-term use

The ALS Association continues to partner with other organizations to oppose the switch to capped rental and we will continue to strongly communicate that message to CMS. As the regulatory process moves forward, we will provide additional information and will alert the ALS community if grassroots action is needed. If CMS does not act to address our concerns, The Association will pursue other options, potentially including legislation, to ensure people with ALS have access to SGDs that play a critical role in their lives.
In the meantime, if you or someone you know experiences any difficulty accessing SGDs or other Durable Medical Equipment, such as power wheelchairs or accessories, please contact your local ALS Association Chapter immediately. Chapter contact information is available here: http://www.alsa.org/community/. If you do not have a local Chapter, please contact The ALS Association’s Public Policy Department at advocacy@alsa-national.org. The Association will actively provide assistance to anyone experiencing difficulties accessing these devices and also will share these difficulties with CMS officials and Members of Congress so that they fully understand how policy changes impact people with ALS and why they must change.

Dedicated Devices

On February 27, 2014, CMS issued a guideline titled a "coverage reminder" that addresses the types of SGDs and the features of the devices that Medicare will cover. This guideline raises several questions about the features of currently available SGDs, and about the temporary "locking" or "dedication" practice that has been in place since 2001 for computer-based devices. Under current practice, non-medical applications such as email and word processing software, are “locked” on computer-based devices because Medicare will not cover those applications. However, people with ALS subsequently may have the manufacturer “unlock” these additional features by paying a fee, which again is not covered by Medicare.
Both the wording of the document and the manner in which it was issued (coverage reminder as opposed to amending coverage policy) make it unclear exactly what implications it has for SGD coverage now and in the future. There is some speculation that this guideline would end coverage for SGDs or disallow coverage for devices that include non-medical applications such as word processing software, regardless of whether those applications are “locked.” At this time it is just speculation and it is not clear exactly how the guideline impacts current coverage policy. However, it is clear that this guideline does not end Medicare coverage of SGDs and it does not end coverage for computer-based devices, which have been available to Medicare recipients since May 2001. It also does not change the evaluation or documentation required to support Medicare coverage.
As with “capped rental,” The Association is working with other organizations and with industry partners who share our concerns about the potential implications of the guideline. Together we will be working with CMS to clarify the meaning of the guideline and to ensure that people with ALS will continue to have access to SGDs, including computer-based devices. We also will keep the ALS community updated as the regulatory process moves forward and will alert the community if action is necessary.
In the meantime, if you or someone you know experiences any difficulty accessing SGDs, including computer-based devices, please contact your local ALS Association Chapter immediately. Chapter contact information is available here: http://www.alsa.org/community/. If you do not have a local Chapter, please contact The ALS Association’s Public Policy Department at advocacy@alsa-national.org. The Association will actively provide assistance to anyone experiencing difficulties accessing these devices and also will share these difficulties with CMS officials and Members of Congress so that they fully understand how policy changes impact people with ALS and why they must change.
If you have any questions about these issues or would like additional information, please contact the Public Policy Department at advocacy@alsa-national.org.