After acting as the scanner-in-chief for the company that invented the eFit, [Konstantin] Borodin is now the lead ear spelunker for NextSense, which was born at Google and spun out of Alphabet’s X division.
The startup’s focus is brain health—improving sleep, helping patients with epilepsy, and eventually enriching the lives of people with a range of mental conditions. The idea is to use its earbuds to capture an electroencephalogram, a standard tool for assessing brain activity.
Just as an ECG tracks the fibrillations of the heart, an EEG is used to diagnose anomalies in brain activity. While some smart watches—Apple, Samsung, Fitbit—offer versions of an ECG and aim to spy on your sleep, collecting neural data has mostly been a can’t-try-this-at-home activity. Until now.
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NextSense has struck up partnerships with universities and drug companies to explore the medical uses of its earbuds. A multinational pharmaceutical firm called Otsuka hopes to use NextSense’s earbuds to assess the efficacy of medication, not only for epilepsy but for depression and other mental health issues. NextSense plans to submit its device for FDA approval this year, and Emory is conducting more studies in hopes of developing an algorithm to predict seizures, ideally hours or days in advance.
