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Facebook Exec's New Startup 'Open Water' Targets Wearable Brain Imaging (xconomy.com)
gthuang88 writes: Display-tech guru Mary Lou Jepsen is leaving her post at Facebook/Oculus to work on a new startup called Open Water. Jepsen, a veteran of Google X and the MIT Media Lab, says the company will develop wearable MRI devices that could help doctors do early detection of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Inspired in part by musician Peter Gabriel, Open Water also hopes to use advances in neural imaging and brain-machine interfaces to create a system for reading and communicating human thoughts electronically. She believes there's huge potential in the manufacturing plants in Asia that are primarily used to make OLEDs and LCDs. "My big bet is we can use that manufacturing infrastructure to create the functionality of a $5 million MRI machine in a consumer electronics price-point wearable. And the implications of that are so big." At that price-point, every doctor's office in the world could afford such a device and use it to detect early stages of neurodegenerative disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, internal bleeding, blood clots, and more.
How?
The magnet field emitted by an MRI is so powerful it can cause metal objects to fly through the air and damage the machine. By what magic of DSP voodoo do they propose to shrink a machine which makes a Microwave Oven look like an LED flashlight by comparison down to a "wearable" size/price?
Does it use the earth's magnetic field with an extremely long "shutter time"? If so: how do they address the target moving while the continuous "exposure" is recording? Where is this data being cached and how is it getting off the wearable and into the cloud?