Coffee Conversation with Steven Plymale and Milos Popovic at Toronto Rehabweek 2019
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
Release Date: 09/05/2023
Gautam Sadarangani on the importance of measuring and gamifying physical therapy exercises
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
is the President & COO/CTO of by BioInteractive Technologies, a digital health system that provides a better way to retrain movement for the hand, wrist, and elbow. Top 3 Takeaways: "Our core competence here is the fact that we're able to measure the limb with sufficient accuracy and sufficient resolution for rehabilitation purposes while being very unobtrusive for the person to wear essentially 24/7" "Quantifying and motivating is a big deal. It's not different than when you're trying to lose weight and use a weighing scale. You need those parameters to tell you if you're moving...
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John Doucet on helping companies get FDA approval at MCRA
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
is a neuroscientist and biomedical engineer with 10+ years of FDA experience in medical device regulation, and 13+ years of Johns Hopkins experience in discovery science, and 6+ years of management experience at FDA and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He has extensive knowledge of medical device regulatory pathways to drive technologies from conception to market. Top 3 Takeaways: "That's what clients are paying for, I can detect the signal from the noise and all the stuff the company is doing, bring that to the FDA in a way that they can digest it "Everyone wants breakthrough...
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Ni-Ka Ford on the importance of medical illustration
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
is a that works with both 2D and 3D sketches often in the neurotech space. Top 3 Takeaways: "I was doing an illustration for a procedure. And what happened was the surgeon actually ended up changing his manuscript after seeing my illustration." There are 4 accredited graduate programs for Medical Illustration "When I do something that's more a schematic, I could finish an illustration in maybe a week. More rendered illustrations that are high in details may take me about a month to complete." 0:45 "Can you describe what you do?" 2:45 "How did you get into this?" 5:00 "It...
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Dr Paul Tubig and Dr Darcy McCusker on neuroethics workshops
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
and are graduates from the University of Washington. Dr Tubig now works at at Georgia Southern University teaching neuroethics and is teaching social and political philosophy, bioethics, neuroethics, and philosophy of disability. Top 3 Takeaways: "There have been reports and testimonies of users who have experienced a sense of depersonalization, a sense of alienation and a sense that they are no longer themselves [after using implanted neurotechnology]." "It turns out that when you have an ethicist in the room, you end up asking really different kinds of questions of your...
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Seth Hays pairing VNS with rehab for better patient outomes
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
's research focus at the University of Texas at Dallas is enhancing neuroplasticity, or the ability of the brain to change, in order to treat neurological disease. The majority of current studies evaluate the ability of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), a putative targeted plasticity therapy, to improve recovery in models of motor dysfunction Top 3 Takeaways: "VNS itself is not a thing unto itself. It's really the combination of VNS with the rehabilitation that's producing the effects that we see" "We think this is most effective when there's really some deficit that you have trouble...
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Francois Ladouceur on a new paradigm for action potential sensing through optics
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
is a University of New South Wales professor teaching and researching integrated optics, silica and diamond-based photonics, optical sensing networks, and photonics-based brain/machine interfaces Top 3 Takeaways: "it's a liquid crystal-based transducer that can transduce an electrical signal into an optical signal that we can carry the away from the place of measurement" With electrical-based electrodes making the devices smaller increases the impedance degrading the signal which doesn't happen in LCP based electrodes "We have built a chip, which is bidirectional, it can read the...
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Sergey Young on lifespan and health span extension through his Longevity Fund
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
is a longevity investor and visionary with a mission to extend healthy lifespans of at least one billion people. To do that, Sergey founded Longevity Vision Fund to accelerate life extension technological breakthroughs and to make longevity affordable and accessible to all Top 3 Takeaways: "I'm sponsoring the development of age reversal X price. This is a technological competition to basically reverse aging measured by a set of biomarkers." "Some of the companies that we have in our portfolio decrease the cost of a particular healthcare intervention or solution to a particular health...
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Miguel Nicolelis on Neuralink and performing in front of a billion people at the 2014 World Cup
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
Although the is best known for pioneering studies in neuronal population coding, Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMI) and neuroprosthetics in human patients and non-human primates, they have also developed an integrative approach to studying neurological and psychiatric disorders including Parkinsons disease and epilepsy. Top 3 Takeaways: "Every Brazilian kid dreams to play for the Brazilian national team in a world cup game, I didn't quite fulfill the dream, but I got as close as a scientist can get. And we had about 65,000 people in the stadium that day in about 1.2 billion people watching the...
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Kip Ludwig on some of the more controversial neurotech ideas
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
leads the Bioelectronic Medicines Laboratory at the , with the goal of developing next-generation neuromodulation therapies that use minimally invasive strategies to highjack the nervous system to treat circuit dysfunction and deliver biomolecules to target areas with unprecedented precision. Prior to Wisconsin, Dr. Ludwig served as the Program Director for Neural Engineering at the National Institutes of Health. He co-led the Translational Devices Program at NINDS, led the NIH BRAIN Initiative programs to catalyze implantable academic and clinical devices to stimulate and/or record from the...
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Justin Sanchez on going from working at DARPA to helping roll out tech at Battelle
Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions
is a Life Sciences Research Technical Fellow at but before that he was Director of Biological Technologies office at DARPA. Top 3 Takeaways "You'll never be able to establish your academic career unless you go and move to another place. I'm like, guys, this doesn't make any sense to me. What's most important is to do great work in the field and establish a foundation of the field." "I still had my university job for a couple of years while I was serving at DARPA. And if my time at DARPA and everybody's term-limited at DARPA. When that term ended, I could have gone back to Miami." "I...
info_outlineSteven Plymale is the CEO of MyndTec. He joined the firm in late 2017 and has more than 25 years of experience in the medical device industry. Previously, he was CEO of Profound Medical, bringing the company from a small six-person team to going public in 2015 in an IPO that raised $60 million. Plymale was also with Xltek, now a division of Natus Medical, and Claron Technologies.
Milos Popovic is the Director of the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute (KITE) and professor in the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. He is also the co-founder and director of the MyndTec. Popovic’s decade of research and randomized clinical trials with stroke and spinal cord injury populations led to the development of the MyndMove device.
Takeaways:
Multidisciplinary teams help to build a successful rehabilitation institute.
Translation of rehabilitation technology is not easy but it can be fun.
It is important to harness neuroplasticity in the body and the brain to achieve successful long-lasting outcomes in rehabilitation.
[0:00] Steven Plymale and Milos Popovic introduced themselves to kick off the conversation with Jen French from Neurotech Reports and Ladan.
[0:35] Milos Popovic describes how RehabWeek 2019 ended up being hosted in Toronto, the first time the event was held in North America, and the plan his team put together
[1:32] Popovic describes his career journey from a nuclear engineer to director of an innovative rehabilitation research center and entrepreneur.
[3:33] Discussion of the building of the rehabilitation institute in Toronto Health Network with a team of 90 people and the importance of working directly with patients.
[4:58] Popovic describes the translation of technology from lab to the marketplace particularly in functional electrical stimulation and human clinical trials to a start-up company.
[6:24] Steven Plymale describes how he was introduced to MyndTec and his initiation into a small, struggling start-up company. Hear how he was convinced that electrical stimulation is not voodoo science
[7:50] Plymale and Popovic describe the MyndMove device.. Discussion ensues about the impact on upper extremity rehabilitation and the involvement of the brain, the melody of the neural activity, and how this therapy capitalizes on the neuroplasticity in the brain.
[12:02] Plymale discusses the current stage of MyndMove in the project development spectrum including regulatory approvals, raising capital investment, and pricing model.
[15:26] What is the target market for the MyndTec neural re-education device? Plymale also talks about their pursuit for clinical partners, their strategic focus and the economics of the medical device as an early stage venture.
[18:06] Steven Plymale talks about his career journey in the medical device industry and how he enjoys start-up ventures.
[19:25] Popovic concludes talking about what excites him at RehabWeek and the potential relationships building from this meeting.