Cofounder, Empatica
Matteo Lai: Beauty and Medical Wearables | Health | WIRED
"We tried to design a medical device that was also beautiful. It is a very very simple device with a ring of LEDs that tell you the time," says Matteo Lai, showing off his company's medical grade wearable, Embrace.
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Embrace is the result of more than eight years of work by Empatica, a spin-off startup that emerged from MIT Media Lab. It comes with a range of sensors that are built into pretty much all smartphones and wearables out there -- an accelerometer, a gyroscope -- but it also comes with a electrodermal activity sensor, which is a real-t...
About Matteo Lai
Matteo Lai, cofounder of Empatica, discussed the company's medical-grade wearable, Embrace, in a 2015 interview. He stated that the device was designed to be both functional and aesthetically pleasing, noting, "We didn't want to have an ugly medical device like everybody else's." Embrace includes sensors such as an accelerometer, gyroscope, and electrodermal activity sensor, and is intended to detect seizures and alert caregivers via a smartphone. Lai explained that the device originated from research on stress in nonverbal children with autism at the MIT Media Lab, where a student discovered a strong sensor response during a seizure, leading to a focus on epilepsy. Lai said Empatica chose to release Embrace through a consumer path, including a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo in partnership with the Epilepsy Foundation, to make the technology available sooner. He noted that the device was priced at $200 and that for each device sold during the campaign, one was donated to a child with epilepsy who could not afford it. Lai described challenges in bringing the product to market, including convincing risk-averse engineers to join a small company and managing manufacturing complexity. He added that Empatica focuses on neurological conditions such as autism, depression, chronic pain, and anxiety, and that the device collects data continuously to help understand patterns leading to seizures.
Transcript (11 segments)
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Matteo Lai0:10
Hi everybody. I was feeling very bad to speak after C because Nanoor is really an amazing technology, but they provide an interesting cue on wearables and what they're used for today. This is an article from a pretty well-known magazine, and it asked an interesting question. I would like to ask you the same question. The Apple Watch is being shipped today, so it's a kind of interesting day. How many of you in the audience think that wearables today are not doing a lot for people that are suffering from chronic diseases? Raise your hands. A lot of people. Okay, thanks. So do I.
Studying kids with autism, he was studying stress in kids with autism, and these kids were non-verbal, so they couldn't express their emotions. This is a big problem for learning, in school for the teacher, your friends, or your parents as well. There's a lot of behavioral problems because of this. Around Christmas time, one of the students of Rosalind, she invented the affective computing field, so she had a lot of passionate students. One of the students asked to borrow two sensors to put on his little brother who had autism. He put it on the left wrist, right wrist. It was this one, not so fancy, but it had a few electrodes measuring some body signals. It was quiet, and she thought the sensor was broken. When the student came back from holidays, it turned out the little kid had had a seizure. Rosalind didn't know he was suffering from epilepsy. While they were trying to look at these little changes in body signals, they found a huge response in one of the sensors. From there, we began a study focused on epilepsy, which is one of the world's most common brain diseases and doesn't have a cure. Something that doesn't get a lot of publicity is that it claims a lot of lives each year. This is a graph of some of the killers in today's world.
We had to have a sensor that works well in real life. This is something you cannot do at the hospital; you have to track it in real life. The sensor had to be good, then you have to understand what the data mean and how you can intervene in real time, and also provide some help in a meaningful way. We started with the first problem and developed a sensor that I'm wearing the last version of. It's called the E4. It's a wearable used for research, not for consumers to see how many steps you're taking during the day. It's used to study diseases in real life, outside of the hospital. It has a few sensors, sends the data to the smartphone, and researchers use it to do many different things. We didn't plan to study cardiovascular diseases and many other stuff. We received and enabled research that wasn't really possible before because it's outside of the hospital, which medicine is based on today. We also went back with the data we had and studied epilepsy in a closer way. You can see here, I know this is very boring, it'll be quick I promise. You can see a trace from the accelerometers, which is the only way we have today to see seizures in daily life. When you have the convulsion, you can see these are seizures. The red marks are the ones where the doctors said, reading the EEG, that there was a seizure. You can see the difference in the accelerometers.
The results from the data analytics show the red line is electrodermal activity, one of the sensors we have. The response is huge compared to the rest of the day. When Rosalind was looking at the difference in stress levels, she was looking at these tiny changes and then found this huge response. These are sleep storms, used in other research believed to be related to memory consolidation during the night. This research was published in quite a few places. It took a few years, and we went from slightly work-in-progress devices to less crappy ones all along.
Normal people, healthy people, have these beautiful devices you can buy at the Apple Store. Why should they have ugly looking stuff? They should have more beautiful stuff than the people that are healthy. So we went on and tried to design a medical device that was also beautiful. We designed a device called the Embrace. It's a watch, basically a very simple device. It has a ring of LEDs that tells you the time, and it has a few sensors that track what your body is doing in real time. It also has a vibration motor that alerts you when something is happening. This can be a seizure, but it can also be something else. It has quite a few sensors.
People living with epilepsy have people that follow them, and their lifestyle today is very disrupted. Imagine you're a mom and you have a child that has epilepsy. You cannot sleep in another room at night because if the kid has a seizure and you're not there, it's a risk. You can imagine what it means for people living with this condition. The fact that you can have something that automatically tracks what's going on and alerts people that are in need, even if your kid is in college with his roommate, it makes quite a difference. That's the primary goal we designed the Embrace for. We also designed it so that people living with this condition could have data that was not available before. Today, people with epilepsy have to mark the seizure on a calendar. It's not the best most efficient system. With the Embrace, you can collect data 24/7 and relate them to the seizure. We believe that with time, we'll have enough information to understand the patterns that lead to seizure. There's a lot of research that shows if you have a lot of stress, sleep disruption, or eating disorders, it affects the likelihood of getting seizures.
You might think we could just wait, do the FDA approval or the CE mark, get insurance reimbursement, and then sell it at a higher price. The problem is that when you're working on such a condition, you have a sort of pressure to get the technology to reach people. The early adopters first, there's probably many in this room. I'm an early adopter myself. What we did, we partnered with private donors so that for each device sold during the crowdfunding campaign, one could be donated to a child that suffers from epilepsy and cannot afford the device. That was a way to give new technology to people who need it, not just because they can afford it right away. We feel very good about that. We're also trying to do something that goes beyond epilepsy. If you don't have epilepsy, you can use the Embrace anyhow to track your daily activity. We want to build an interesting experience for people that are suffering today. These sensors are useful also in many other realms, and we enable a lot of research.
Devices are provided by the medical companies, so there's also a way to share the data when you know what they mean and you can intervene and make decisions. It's a way to build an experience with your family, your loved ones, your friends. We believe there are many other applications in the future for this. Of course, as you might have guessed, it doesn't happen overnight. We started a very tiny company based in Milan and Cambridge, and we also do the production in Korea, which I don't recommend because it's very far away. I'd like to thank a lot of passionate people that really believe in this project.
Is this tracking telling us what we're learning about you? Is it tracking too much? No, this is the research device. When I look at the data when I get off, it will show that I was freaking out because of the audience. But at least I can compare when I speak publicly and see how much I'm freaking out from one talk to the other. This bracelet is one of the early prototypes, very light and very elegant. This is the Italian design. The designer wanted to have the camel and the one for the American market and say, 'Look, give me a blue one and a silver one, and you can do whatever other color you want, I just keep this one.'
We're talking about helping track epilepsy in predictive ways based on what you're doing. It's a lot of work, and a company has to stay very focused. We tend to focus on neurological diseases. There are other things we're working on pretty much in the same use case of epilepsy that we'd like to do in the future. There's autism, which actually led to the epilepsy discovery. There's also depression, chronic pain, general stress, sleep disorders, and anxiety. The devices are also used in treating post-traumatic stress disorders or Alzheimer's. There are many other applications, but of course it takes a lot of time because you have to do the research very well and then the medical approval. It takes quite some time, but we chose to go the medical route.
What's the toughest challenge you faced so far in trying to take this sort of product to market? I would say there are different challenges at different stages of the life of a company. At the beginning, it's finding the people, convincing a lot of people. Sometimes the most talented engineers are very averse to risk, so they don't want to join a tiny company trying to do something nobody's done before. Manufacturing is also a big challenge because it's easy to say you want to do something beautiful and medical quality, but then you have to actually deliver. That takes a lot of complexity, but it's very fascinating. The size we were able to get today for the sensors has never been available before.