Measuring brain activity - Ryan Field on the Harry Glorikian Show

<p>You can wear an Oura ring or a WHOOP armband to tell you how your body is adapting to exercise. A continuous glucose monitor can send your phone information about your blood sugar levels are changing. And during the pandemic, a lot of people bought home pulse oximeters to monitor their blood oxygenation levels. But there’s one part of the body where home health sensors haven’t reached yet, and that’s our brains. They're protected inside our thick skulls, which means it’s pretty hard to measure what’s going on in there. Until recently, the only real instruments available to doctors and neuroscientists were big hospital-based machines like X-Rays, CT-scans, EEGs, and MRIs.</p><p>But that might finally be changing. Harry's guest this week is Ryan Field, chief technology officer at Kernel. The vision of the L.A.-based company is to develop a consumer device that would work like a pulse oximeter, but for your brain. The first version, Kernel Flow, is shaped like a bicycle helmet, and it contains more than 50 low-power lasers that beam light through your scalp into your skull, into the outermost layers of your brain. Hundreds of detectors built in the helmet collect the light that’s scattered back to determine oxygen levels in the brain’s blood supply, which is an indirect measure of neural activity.</p><p>Field says the company isn't yet targeting specific consumer applications for the Kernel Flow. But it's already using the device in early studies designed to measure a user’s level of focus on a specific task, or how their brain activity changes in response to pain therapy or psychedelic drugs. Field says what Kernel has done is sort of like building the very first iPhone -- but if the only app the device came with was Maps. Now it's up to developers to figure out what else to do with it.</p><p>For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at <a href="http://www.glorikian.com/podcast">http://www.glorikian.com/podcast </a></p><p><strong>Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple