“We struggled for six or seven months to make a working sensor,” says Ramakrishnan, who has been part of the Platt Labs for three years. In early 2017, they decided to build their own portable EEG, getting a boost from a National Science Foundation-funded seed grant allocated by Penn’s Singh Center for Nanotechnology. Most lacked high-quality sensors overall or had sensors whose quality dropped quickly once the wearer began moving.
“We naively thought that we could just take advantage of current market-ready solutions that were out there.”īut the more options the team tested, the more obvious it became that nothing was quite what they wanted.
“This all grew out of our desire as a group-and my strong conviction-to get neuroscience out of the lab and into the hands of people who could use it to reach their full potential,” says Platt, a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with appointments in the School of Arts and Sciences, Perelman School of Medicine, and Wharton School. Though it’s still in the early stages, the technology has potential applications from health care to sports performance and customer engagement.
The device, a portable electroencephalogram (EEG), is intentionally unobtrusive to allow for extended wear, and, on the backend, powerful algorithms decode the brain signals the sensors collect. The platform is akin to a Fitbit for the brain, with a set of silicon and silver nanowire sensors embedded into a head covering like a headband, helmet, or cap. When they weren’t satisfied with what was available commercially, they built one themselves. For the work they wanted to do, Ramakrishnan (above) and Platt sought a high-quality, portable EEG that, once in place, didn’t disturb the user.