A Neurotech Startup

During my sophomore year at Tufts, 3 of my friends and I got together to find a solution for our shared inability to get good consistent sleep. We decided to apply what we had learned in class about neurostimulation and build a wearable headset that uses transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) to help users fall asleep faster. As the head of research in our team, I gathered findings from scientific literature and our user research surveys to define our headset's key functional design features.

We eventually got enough traction to turn our project into a fully fledged startup that we called Cogna, and we were off to the races. The 2 following years were filled with caffeine-fueled brainstorming sessions, electrical engineering crash courses, destroyed prototypes, and a few successful pitches that secured us enough funding to finally finish building our headset. 

We were getting ready to launch our beta-testing program, but the release date of a global pandemic came a little sooner than ours, putting our sleep-enhancing dreams to an end. However, I got a fun ride into the entrepreneurial world, and valuable hands-on experience with signal processing and tES.

Click here to check out the old Cogna website!

Our headset was built to easily fit into anyone's nighttime routine. Our users could put it on before brushing their teeth or reading a book and start their tailored stimulation session with a simple tap on the Cogna app. The headset's electrodes were designed to deliver a slow alternating current to the prefrontal cortex for 20 minutes to help the brain transition to sleepier states of activity.

Check out this article for an overview on tES and sleep.