A cutting-edge Australian-US tech firm in the disabilities sector will list on the ASX on Monday.
Creating a communications sensor for people unable to speak or barely move, such as sufferers of motor neurone disease, cerebral palsy and strokes, and accident victims, has been the passion of Queenslander Peter Ford.
The former Seven Network journalist, newsreader, and later NBC and CNN anchor, and NASA correspondent enjoyed a distinguished Australian-US media career that included covering Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf, and, after 9/11, reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Ford had another passion, technology — learning computer programming in the early 1980s, and in the early 2000s he turned his mind to technology for the disability sector and gained a contract with the US Veterans Administration in 2007.
His company Control Bionics spent years perfecting his sensor NeuroSwitch, taking it from originally looked like laboratory equipment and electromyography (EMG) technology involving electrodes and wires to a simple wireless sensor that clips to the skin. It converts small muscle and body movements into typed text.
The company will achieve its next milestone on Monday when it lists on the ASX following an IPO which raised $15m at 60¢ per share, which has given the company a $50m market cap. Stockbroker Morgans was the lead manager of the float.
Private equity firm Nightingale managing director and chairman Lindsay Phillips is on the Control Bionics board and is a long-term investor.
The company has appointed Robert Wong as CEO. He has a long association with the digital technology industry.
Mr Wong said now was the right time to list, because the NeuroNode technology was “really mature” and ripe for the disability market.
“We’ve got FDA approval for the product, we’ve enhanced it with eye-gaze technology in the last year and a half,” he said. “It’s right, now, to really expand operations in the US and Australia and we felt that the IPO was the most logical way to do that.”
Mr Ford will be president of innovation in the revamped business.
NeuroNode has morphed from the original NeuroSwitch which enabled a virtually paralysed MND sufferer to communicate by sending a signal from the brain to a muscle such as a forehead muscle, even if the muscle isn’t functional.
NeuroNode can now detect eye movements and spatial movements to do anything you’d normally do with a keyboard, mouse and joystick.
This has seen NeuroNode adapt to conditions such as cerebral palsy where machine-learning filters the uncontrolled movements such as spasms, from deliberate movements used to communicate. Other users have suffered traumatic brain injury, spinal muscular atrophy, car accidents, or struggled to communicate after a stroke.
NeuroNode now is a small sensor that users can wear as a watch or as an attachment to their body where they use repetitive small muscle movements to signal numbers and letters.
The sensor is now a wireless input device to a phone, tablet, computer or robot. It’s like an alternative mouse.
Control Bionics has grown to have a US head office in Cincinnati, Ohio, a sales and implementation team around the US, and offices in Sydney and Melbourne.
Mr Wong said the new funds would help the company increase its presence across the US and Australia.
“Our customers are telling us that our system is faster and less fatiguing than many other AAC (augmented and alternative communication) competitors out there,” Mr Wong said.
Mr Ford said the NeuroNode device included clinical grade EMG sensing, a computer to process that, a three-axis accelerometer and a thermometer. Users can control “a robot that actually feeds them so it brings a spoon of food up to their mouth”.
There are cases where users hadn’t properly communicated for years before they used NeuroNode. Mr Wong gave the example of a 67-year-old who 30 years ago had a beam drop on the back of his neck who hadn’t communicated for decades.
“It’s not all serious communication. One client unable to move or communicate now operates his online betting account.”
Mr Ford said the system had been used to control remote presence robots and he previously had remotely raced a real world robot with a client who was totally paralysed.
The NeuroNode system price is about $21,000 and the company so far has sold 250 units in the US and Australia.