I taught Physical Computing at Parsons Design+Tech from 2006 to 2014. During 2011, there were lots of students who wanted to use biosensing in their projects. Electrodermal Activity (EDA) is pretty easy, but they wanted more, so I showed them a ‘simple circuit’ that uses an LED, light sensor, and OpAmp, to read heart beats through your skin. Well, the circuit was not easy for newbies to put together, and the result was stress and tears instead of cool projects. The summer after that year, my friend Yury and I saw an opportunity for an open-source project. After about two months and $250, we had working prototypes and launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the first production run of Pulse Sensor. We’ve been making and selling them ever since.
Tympan is part of an initiative to create open-source hardware and software for hearing aid development and research. It’s not a hearing aid per se, but it could certainly be used as one, albeit a bulky one. The initiative has been funded by NIH and NIDCD since 2017 (fact check?). Here’s a link to the original solicitation. Our team consists of Tympan (that’s me) as the hardware engineer and commercialization partner, along with Creare, an engineering firm in NH that is lead on the grant, and academic partners at The Center for Hearing Research at Boys Town National Research Hospital. Our original Tympan is based on a Teensy 3.6, which came out just as we were getting funded and deciding on our hardware platform. (looking forward to the Teensy 4.0!). One of my goals is to make Tympan attractive to a wider audience than just audiological engineers and researchers.
We are soliciting testers for our beta hardware !
Fill out this form for a chance to get your wrist on one!
OPEN SOURCE HEALTH ACTIVITY KIT
Why Make An Open Source Fitness Tracker? Why indeed… The short answer, is Because We Can! That's right, the availability of open-source technology has exploded over the last decade with access to low-cost development boards and powerful code libraries to the point where you'd think simple things like fitness trackers would start to self-assemble on the UPS truck in the box from SparkFruit. OpenHAK intends to allow users to discover activity tracking and how it works. By creating an open platform that counts your steps, and measures your heart rate, we hope to help demystify these technologies and allow users to tweak, change, modify, and create all possible data streams.
In 2012, the Obama administration launched the Brain Initiative to revolutionize our understanding of the human brain. Funding was provided through NIH, NSF, and DoD. One such solicitation was an SBIR grant lead by DARPA, and called for open-source, low-cost, high-quality EEG. Creare, an engineering firm in NH, does a lot of work on these type of grants, and Chip, who works there saw this Open Source EEG opportunity, and thought to himself “Who do I know who does open-source biosensing?” Then he remembered that he had a Pulse Sensor on his desk. I got a cold call from Chip at the end of 2012, and became a part of the team as hardware engineer and commercialization partner. At the end of our Phase I grant, we had better working hardware than anyone expected, so I put a team together and launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund further development and co-found OpenBCI, Inc. I worked with OpenBCI from 2014 to 2018 as President and CTO.