Join efforts (or at least align them) with HackEEG and maybe NeuroStimDuino

[dumblob]

https://www.crowdsupply.com/starcat/hackeeg

https://www.crowdsupply.com/neuralaxy/neurostimduino

Thoughts?

[joshbrew]

@dumblob

I'm always down for collaboration but it's not super trivial to get any practical partnerships going other than making some kind of flag to rally around.

For one: we have no pretenses about making big bucks on these devices, the goal is quite the opposite - to tank the cost to buyers without a loss in quality, so profit-first groups (i.e. most groups producing hardware) are immediately scared off from working with us in any form, including OpenBCI whom we already approached (to my surprise, but names don't necessarily mean anything). I'm working on a chip that'll make a 15 dollar 8 channel EEG, there's no money to be made there if you charge an honest margin (i.e. <50% rather than, I dunno, 1000% or whatever the typical margins are).

Secondly: We've got a bunch of our own projects around the whole open source EEG and biofeedback sphere. We're working on more hardware and I'm working on a generic software platform that I'll look to integrate anyone's hardware into after I'm comfortable with the features. So time-wise I don't have much to spare, and I have a few goals for the next few months that at least in my mind are better ideas than anything else happening right now in this space.

I have some serious gripes about the priorities in this industry, and in tech in general. Hardware and to some extent still software design aren't community driven spaces like they should be as a lot of the cost and learning barriers are only recently coming down in a big way. There's so much pretense around it all still which does not help encourage people to get involved or collaborate openly, in fact it ends up wasting more money on poorly informed/disorganized development funded by clueless investors who overestimate the quality of the work they're doing and don't care much about actual ethics (rather, taking advantage of a for-profit health care system). I'm no pro but it doesn't take an expert to see these issues everywhere. I'm all ears for people who actually seriously want to work together, though, but it's not exactly been trivial to come up with something that satisfies everyone due to all this business nonsense and our complete disinterest in exploiting it.

[dumblob]

I think I share your positions on the state of medical industry (while staying aware that all the first and recurring (re)certifications and approvals from federal organizations & laboratories are super expensive and the money has to come from somewhere for this purpose).

I didn't want to ignite any heated discussion. I just imagined if all these organizations tried to agree on some minimal subset of generic APIs and hardware properties (e.g. which 3 chip architectures to use or how to do low-noise placement & routing of electronic parts on a PCB, etc.), it'd benefit us all. This spec would then evolve over time, but it'd be the first "milestone" for any beginner or integrator (btw. IMHO integration is the future of medical technology - the strong trend of recent years "point of care diagnostics" greatly amplifies that).

So I'm sorry if you have had a rather bad experience with OpenBCI or any other organization. I'm not in contact with any of those, so I didn't know of this. Let's have hope it'll turn out differently after having you as a business partner.

[joshbrew]

@dumblob The idea of an ideal minimum architecture is pretty much what I'm trying to come up with since that's about all I'm capable of making anyway. This project and Dmitry's continuing work is to try to scale up channel counts on a single board, he's doing 64 channels next.

You can readily look up the latest and greatest chips (which usually happen to be some of the cheapest too) and the datasheets tell you how to get best results on the PCB layouts. The irony is stunningly few people are aggressively hunting the best low cost specs down for beneficial or state of the art tech (optical imaging is the area I'm looking at most right now which is way more underserved than EEG) when this is basically LEGOs now plus a few nuances in PCB design (plus the issue of finding cheap prototype manufacturers like PCBway). You can make a shocking amount of up-to-date hardware before you ever break 30 bucks in parts + assembly costs for TONS of stuff, especially depending on how much you can do yourself.

RE industry costs, sure that's a big issue but so much can be cut back with better project management and ending exploitative relationships (e.g. lab costs, or obtuse shareholders). IMO mass manufacturing of public interest technology should have some kind of public co-operative thing around it driven by universities or some ethical group so it's not just at the mercy of markets and whatever regulations there might or might not be, but that would require a big group of people to have compassion and not be psychotically ignorant if that's even a thing anymore. I don't mean to get heated but I've been completely disappointed by whatever you could call the current leadership around BCI, and it reflects the problems in the wider industry pretty well I think, it's just a joke. There's almost no serious conversation about the kind of wider community we want to foster either even though we are all contributing fragments to a massive evolving base of code and engineering. Personally I think the clock's ticking down on whether we can form proper organizations around all this tech, things are changing really fast and a lot of people could benefit now more than ever with suitably adaptive and compassionate efforts.

For BCI in particular it's potentially transformative for a ton of mental health therapies while completely noninvasive so it's senseless to let it stay exclusive especially if I can succeed even current-day $300+ professional releases for 15 fucking dollars and minimal jank. Think of it like this, we don't even have good clinical validation of any of the things that multi million dollar clinics and tech businesses are placing major cost burden on customers for like with EEG, and if it is valid then why would you want there to be artificial barriers to accessing it whatsoever? Most scientists I know work out of pocket too so what about their ability to continue their work? I personally don't want people trading a huge portion of their time to me in the form of money for something they think could help liberate them, that seems pretty wrong. That's the general issue with the lack of a public health care system in the US anyway, but one of the barriers to that happening is companies actually getting on board with affordable and humanistic business models, and proper communities forming to echo basic ethics throughout the industry. Well whatever that's all just what sounds good in my echo chamber here, it might not completely reflect reality. I think it's still important to articulate these ideas.

[dumblob]

I think it's clear where we are now with "medical industry". Thanks for your insights.

Lets leave this open if you don't mind. Just to allow others to help on this front a bit or at least sheir their ideas how to do that.

[joshbrew]

I will have much to share in the coming months as well