The future is now with the DRYODE™ Guardian Development Kit – With Dr. Moritz Thielen, CTO at IDUN Technologies

Our technology is based on the DRYODE™ material, a soft and dry material formulation designed to extract the best quality bio-signals from the body, which means picking up electrical activity of the heart, of muscles and of the brain. We invested years of research first at ETH Zurich, and later within the company to get to an initial formula. Coming from research, the next tricky but crucial step was lab-to-scale, but we are now able to deposit the material using scalable industrial processes. Since the beginning of 2020, we shifted our strategic focus to brain signals, and in this process, transformed to a full stack company. This is heavily impacted our roadmap and hiring strategy. Today, we combine material know-how with electronics, data sciences, design, neuroscience and neuropsychology in a very capable team. This holistic approach allows us to optimize all components along the value chain, from the skin-interface, over raw data, to actionable insights based on our machine learning algorithms. We want to make neurofeedback easy and accessible for our B2B customers and for the end-users of the technology.

We truly believe that our technology has the potential to make almost every product and service better for the customer. Neurofeedback enables a new user and patient experiences through personalization. We are developing three use cases as go-to-market strategy, that all fit under the umbrella of neuro-health. Those cases are sleep, mindfulness and hearing, each of them with the potential for medical and customer orientation. As an example, in sleep we are working on a medical use case targeted at detecting sleep onset during the day, in another case we try to classify drowsiness and attention levels for automotive applications.

The Guardian Development Kit is mainly aimed at electronic manufacturers, pharma companies, automotive or content providers that want to enhance their products or services with neurofeedback. Our goal is to partner with some of those big players to make our technology available to a mass market.

The biggest value of the DRYODE™ Guardian lies in the possibility to record high quality brain signals in a form factor that is unobtrusive and basically invisible. Existing solutions on the market are either uncomfortable and complex or they don’t provide good data quality. With the kit, we want to show an alternative, a solution that is intuitive and unobtrusive. The user should not feel any difference when using our device compared to any other pair of headphones. The only thing that should change is the user experience. We make it possible with empathic technology able to create a tailored environment based on emotional states.

It means the world to us; product releases are always super exciting, as all the puzzle pieces come together and the sweat and tears finally pay off. This time is special because it’s our first full-stack product which implies an extreme complexity in order to cover all the elements with a rather small team. We’re really proud of what we achieved here, especially because we believe that the DRYODE™ Guardian best reflects the fundamental idea and the vision of IDUN. I’m extremely happy about the release and cannot wait to get customer feedback and hope they’ll like the development kit as much as we do. For us it’s the gateway to the Internet of Humans, the missing puzzle piece to link up our brain with internet and enable empathic technology. Many steps are still to be completed until mass adoption but with the DRYODE™ Guardian Development Kit we are one step closer to reaching our goal.