Coworking with…Shilo Case

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I am head of the marketing department for a company that has developed an end-to-end platform that can record, digitize, and process neural signals to enable the restoration of function to those who suffer from paralysis, deafness, and [impaired] sight. Our “brain-computer interface” (BCI) technology has been implanted in 29 humans chronically and nearly 100 sub-chronically since 2004. Our BCI technology was the first available for human research.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

It’s confidential, but our current system records up to 512 channels.

Every end of an electrode is a channel, so it’s a 10-by-10 grid, and off those grids is a tiny pinpoint spike. So that gets implanted into the brain, and the end of the spike allows you to talk to individual neurons—we consider that one channel. The more channels you have, the more neural signals you can listen to, and the more detail you can get from that, translating what those signals mean.

Consider “Channel Count,” like a bit rate. The higher the bit rate, the more information can be transferred. The higher channel count the more neurons we can listen to and record, providing more neural signals to interpret. We have plans over the next three to five years to go from 10,000 channels to 100,000 channels. 

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

I Am Human, produced by Taryn Southern. It’s a documentary that features three people who are using a BCI-type technology to improve their way of life. Blackrock’s technology is used on one of the patients, who has a spinal cord injury.