Phantom Neuro grabs $19M to help amputees put their phantom limbs to use
Summary
Its technology is built on the concept of the phantom limb amputees often feel they still have a physical limb due to the nerve endings they still have that would have connected to that limb.Phantom claims that its Phantom X software, which lets its strip read those nerve impulses and translate them into the movement of the attached prosthetic, showed 94% accuracy across 11 hand and wrist movements in a recent non-invasive ASCENT study. The company claims that users can restore as much as 85% of functionality with just 10 minutes of calibration.Ottobock, a German maker of prosthetics and other medical devices, is leading the round as a strategic backer. That would ultimately limit what he wanted to do in the military, he realized.Thinking back to an experience he had when he was younger, observing a brain operation (his dad was friends with the neurosurgeon, he said, and apparently he was allowed in to sit in the OR), Glass had an a-ha! His scaled impact, he decided, would be to become a neurosurgeon and help people with even more serious limb issues than mere repeat stress fractures.Glass eventually graduated from medical school in Oklahoma, and inspired by science fiction, YouTube, and actual scientific research landed at Johns Hopkins, doing cutting-edge medical research in the field of brain implants used to control physical movement.There, he had one more epiphany: He saw that the field of brain implants was still largely nascent, unwieldy, and too imprecise, on top of being very invasive.Theres a team of PhD students frantically running around, plugging things in and typing on computers, he said of the typical environment in those labs. All of that is very much in the distant future, however.With Phantom focused on building the nerve-prosthetic interface and technology, there is an obvious hand-off that will require equally impressive R&D in the form of the edge devices the prosthetics themselves.