Transcript
Hi, I'm Dave Gardy here for WebAble TV at the M-Enabling Summit in Arlington, Virginia. And I'm here at the control bionics booth known for making the NeuroNode, and I'm with Emily Boland, who is marketing and customer relationship manager. Emily, thanks for joining us.
Absolutely.
So you've been giving a lot of demonstrations here today. Tell us what you've been doing.
Okay. So, typically, when we talk to people, we point out the device. So this is the NeuroNode, and this is our application. And what the device allows you to do is continuously graph your EMG signal. It can be located anywhere on the body, any viable muscle group where you have volitional control. And once you are in the application, you will see that I get a nice, clean peak when I move my ring finger, which is where this placement is tapping into. So once you have that clean peak to find, you can adjust the settings to identify which part of that signal you want to be the switch. And once the settings are saved in the application, they're stored to the actual device, this device can then be paired with any device that accepts a Bluetooth connection. So just in this particular instance, we're gonna look at it interfacing with iOS. So we're gonna go into our simple speech-generating application which we are releasing shortly. It is called Say It Now. And what this allows you to do is speak unique text. It also allows you to save pre-programmed phrases. So we'll just go down here.
App: Hi, how are you?
So you can see that you can generate phrases, store phrases. You can also access any application on the iPad, whether it's home automation or it's a gaming application, so we can get some amusement. This is always fun to demo. We can look at tic-tac-toe. See if you're smarter than the computer, which let's all say a prayer that I am. I won't make any promises. So just a simple application, simple way to test the device and see how it can be used to interact with essentially anything that you or I interact with on a tablet or an iPhone.
Now you mentioned EMG. For the layman, can you give us what EMG is and how it works to measure voltages and stuff?
Absolutely. So EMG stands for electromyography. And what electromyography is, is when you or I think about moving a muscle, our brain sends a signal down to that muscle group and tells that muscle group to move, to react. In order to do that, whether the muscle reacts and responses and flexes or not, an EMG signal is sent from the brain down to that muscle group. So what the device does is it sits on top of the surface of that muscle group and it's able to read those signals whether or not the muscle responds. So you don't have to have a huge movement. You may have a movement that's not visible to the human eye, but that signal is still being sent down through that muscle group.
So if you're totally paralyzed from the neck down, you can clench your jaw, you theoretically could use this.
Yup, you could clench your jaw, you could shrug your shoulders, you could raise your eyebrows.
And this is for people like ALS victims or the type of disability that you'd recommend it for.
So we work a bit stretched on the disability spectrum. So with the profoundly disabled, so we're looking at people with spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, obviously, ALS, MND. But due to the nature of the application and the unique ability to really filter in and identify the perfect part of that EMG signal, the device is also uniquely suited for people that have spasticity. So people with CP are also unique candidates for the technology.
Excellent, well, fascinating demonstration here at the M-Enabling show. How's the show been for you?
It's been good, great coffee.
Excellent. We've been talking to Emily Boland, who's the marketing and customer relationship manager for Control Bionics. That's ControlBionics.com. And their NeuroNode. I'm Dave Gardy here with M-Enabling. Thanks for joining us.
