Set My Brain - Democratizing Neurofeedback

Neurofeedback has been used for mental well-being training requiring expensive headsets, under a clinician’s supervision. We want to democratize neurofeedback-based training with a solution based on affordable sensors, retro games (to overcome language barriers) and cloud-based backend elaboration. Such a solution is scalable by design, inexpensive, shareable, and ubiquitous.

Failure to achieve the mental well-being of large parts of the human population has large economic costs to society in terms of lower productivity, higher direct costs, social welfare costs, and waste of human resources.

 In many countries, difficulties in treatment and preventive measures are compounded by cultural stigma, too. These costs are high, economically and socially, and have led to numerous public policy initiatives with partial success.

Our solution can treat specific issues like stress, anxiety, insomnia, brain ageing, neurodegenerative diseases; it works on mental resilience through a neurocognitive improvement. 

Thirty years of academic research have proved neurofeedback to be an effective technique for fostering mental well-being and addressing the mental disorders we will tackle. SetMyBrain is designed to be a portable bundle of software and EEG biofeedback sensors that will make neurofeedback techniques widely available, affordable, and approachable by:

(1) Leveraging the ubiquitous handheld digital ecosystem;

(2) Engaging the user through a non-taboo retro-gaming environment;

(3) By-passing the need of working with a trained neurofeedback professional;

(4) Using inexpensive wearable sensors to reach a wider population.

SetMyBrain aims at reducing the social and economic impact of mental stress by:

•  Building mental well-being and resilience through neurofeedback training for a variety of conditions. Beneficiaries will be individuals suffering from these conditions, companies in which they operate, and organizations which cater to their mental health;
• Being initially deployed through business oriented programs, and subsequently through commercialization of an inexpensive bundle of an iOS/Android app and EEG sensors;
• Favoring accessibility, and providing an engaging experience that will free users from fears and social taboos, through the usage of open innovation principles.

Design and make available training sessions for the different targets, working on improving the parameters of our algorithms (mental waves, training objectives, feedback related parameters…) in the next 6 months - Building mental well-being and resilience through neurofeedback training for a variety of conditions. Beneficiaries will be individuals suffering from these conditions, companies in which they operate, and organizations which cater to their mental health

Find a panel of ten companies willing to share pilot programs in the next six months with a portfolio of at least three different games; - Being initially deployed through business oriented programs, and subsequently through commercialization of an inexpensive bundle of an iOS/Android app and EEG sensors;

Design and deliver a cloud-based solution to have a cloud repository for downloading games and check one’s own results and machine-learning powered elaboration of user-data, in the next 18 months. - Favoring accessibility, and providing an engaging experience that will free users from fears and social taboos, through the usage of open innovation principles.

SetMyBrain’s uniqueness rests on providing an accessible, affordable, enjoyable, science-based neurofeedback treatment for individuals with mental well-being problems. Neurofeedback has long been available as an expensive professional treatment. Leveraging recent advances in EEG sensor technology and the spread of handheld devices, SetMyBrain will ‘democratize’ neurofeedback as a cost-effective mental well-being treatment that everybody can self-operate.  Over time, access to user data will allow continued improvements through machine learning tools. We have created an international and experienced team of academics and professionals in the neurofeedback area; as well as academics and executives in the finance, entrepreneurship and digital areas. 

SetMyBrain is centered on individuals suffering from lack of mental well-being. Some of them are in easily reachable environments like in companies of rich countries, but others experience economic or social marginalization. The affordability, ubiquity by design and ease of use of our solution allow reaching out to these people, too. The game-based approach further enhances reachability by overcoming social taboos on mental health conditions and their associated treatments; and easily bypass language barriers as well. 

SetMyBrain consists of inexpensive software bundled with equally low-cost non-proprietary EEG sensors. People will use downloadable videogames of well-known retro games (e.g. PAC-MAN and Space Invaders). The cost will decrease with the number of actual users, and we want to remain well below US$100 for a complete solution from the start. Costs can be further reduced by sharing the neurofeedback helmet with other users, for instance within a company, class, or family, applying the sharing economy principles. 

We recently incorporated with a paid-in capital of over US$10K. By September 2017, we will access a loan facility for startups, which will provide us over US$100K with a 5 year maturity and below-market interest rate. We will invest a good part of this in improving the prototype and pushing commercialization of a business-oriented mental well-being program, targeted at HR functions of corporate clients. We have already lined up a dozen potential clients ready to test the product and a first contract will be closed by September 2017 with the Italian subsidiary of a US Fortune 500 Company. Sufficient funding is instrumental to increase the portfolio of retro-games available and enable testing with a wider range of progressively lighter EEG sensors. Subsequently we will look for equity funding to drive an international expansion and mass-market distribution scale-up. 

Acceptance of the novel approach underlying SetMyBrain is key. The scientific fundamentals are already set and the efficacy of science-based neurofeedback techniques is well established. Nonetheless, we want to pursue a wider and established academic community to further discuss our results.  Another key factor is our team’s ability to execute in parallel several research and managerial tasks that will sustain the organization’s growth. All should be done in less than two years with limited resources and budget. Finally, in order to move from a clinical to a mass market stage we need to develop structured and effective distribution channels.

Joining the Solve community, we will speed up our project because of the availability of more subject matter experts in the neuroscience and the possibility of a mentorship to design a solid plan for the internationalization and the mass-market delivery. Also we hope to find technology and legal mentors helping us how to effectively manage the data that we will collect from the users (the records of their brainwaves) that we want to put at the disposal of the academic community (e.g. General Data Protection Regulation compliance). 

Neurosky, a headset manufacturer, supports us. Members of the Italian Association of Psychologists, of the Departments of Psychology at Catholic University of Milan and at Kore University, of the Applied Technology for Neuro-Psychology Lab - IRCCS Istituto Auxologico Italiano are also collaborating. The Biofeedback Federation of Europe knows our project.

we are not aware of competitors providing a similar full stack product