figur8

NAN-WEI GONG: My name is Nan-Wei Gong. And I am the CEO and co-founder of figur8. I'm really excited to be part of MIT's STEX25 this year. So this is the third company I've started. I graduated from the Media Lab at MIT in 2013. And this is the third company I've started. I get all the entrepreneurship support and the learning experience from MIT. I went through to MIT 100K. And my team at that time we won the 100K competition in 2013. And after that, we had a really successful exit.

And I started a second company that's a consulting company that's focused on wearable electronics. So people know me for larger projects that I work on, including a partnership between Google and Levi's, this project called Project Jacquard. It's a smart jacket that allows you to remove the smart interface of the touch screen from your phone to what you wear. So that actually leads to Figur8, which is a wearable platform for motion capture.

Yeah, so a lot of people talk about wearables, like Fitbit, Jawbone. These are companies that people know. And when they think about wearables, they think about a wrist-worn device. So what we do at Figur8 is try to take this one point of measurement of our body into a modular platform that allows you to put, say, a Fitbit on any parts of your body.

So why is that important? Because we're not a stick. Just think about the movement model of your body. We are a skeletal model plus flesh and bones, right? We have muscle. We have ligaments. We have joints. And to do the real form analysis, most existing platforms rely heavily on a roomful of cameras.

And what we're trying to do is to bring those aspects into a tiny form factor so you can wear it. And what's unique about our solution is not only we track the movement, skeletal movement, we also track your 3D contour, which brings the muscle movement and also your ligament laxity and how your joints connect together into the equation.

So that's the form, not just a one point acceleration of one step, rather for a more complicated example like a pitch or a golf swing. These are the types of activities and performances that we can monitor, make suggestions, and also improve upon, either from the athlete's perspective or from the trainer, or a clinician's perspective.

NAN-WEI GONG: What we have is a sensor kit which allows you to put on your body in the modular fashion. So it could be on your upper body, for both arms, it could be on your bicep and tricep, and they are in the form of either integration to your clothing or in the form of concealed tape.

So if you watch the Olympics games, you will see all the athletes have these tape. They are normally colorful, and you wonder what they do. So it's a form factor that's widely accepted already for athletes and for sports medicine.

So we take that form factor and make them smart. So you can use that to track your back muscle, to track your ligaments, say, the laxity of your knee. And these individual sensors can be networked into a network of sensors, and we have all these sensors transmitting signals through Bluetooth to your smartphone, and we're able to give you different suggestions based on this kit, which we call it the movement platform.

And this is a hardware platform with a business model that's similar to what a smartphone is. Apple, for example, has the hardware as the core business model and there are people who can use the phone to create their own apps. That's the app store. And then there's the iTunes store, where you can exchange content that can be used on top of the hardware platform.

So we see ourselves at Figure 8 as the hardware platform for motion capturing, and we want to create this fundamental platform so it's low cost enough for everyone to have this platform so movement data can start becoming something that's interesting, valuable, and we can treat it as a commodity.

What's unique about what we're building is first of all, it's something that is low cost. So we want everyone to be able to afford it. And it brings all the lab related equipment outside of the lab. So yes, there are people working on sports science. Yes, there are people working a lot on digitizing 3D movements, but there aren't a platform that's easy enough for everybody just to use the same platform to either do digital health or to do sports analysis, or just even motion coaching, right? You always need to have a coach next to you to teach you, like, look at your form, to teach you a golf swing.

But now we have this module or toolkit that allows you to just practice on your own, but each pitch counts, each step counts. We'll be able to give you a prediction and analysis wherever you are, outside of the lab setting.

And we have been working very closely with MGH, Massachusetts General Hospital, and how they work on their sports science and the teams that they collaborate with. These are the baseline that we're using to validate our claims, including motion capturing, including how we measure muscle activation, and so on. So that's where we are now.

Well, right now we have many research groups interested in working with us and they have been using our platform to do their analysis and studies, both in computer interaction design, and gaming design, and in different sports training. And as I mentioned before, we want our product to be the platform for motion capturing, which the data can be shared in between different platforms. It's not like we are the only platform, like you said. There are different competitors in the market.

But just like cameras, you have different kinds of cameras and the format is the same and you can share and edit these digital contents. So we want to be the platform that's focused on the content, content management, and allows everyone to create and also download and upload the content. Does that make sense? Right?

So if everyone can afford a digital camera, everyone can create the content of digital photography, and that was a revolution for photography. So that that's where I see the company is going is we are the first to make a platform so digitizing 3D body movement is a possibility.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NAN-WEI GONG: We started a company in January 2017. And now we grew really quickly to 14 people. Almost 20 people now. We are currently ramping up the production so our kit will be available to everyone in Q4 2018.

And right now we are selecting different partners in different industries to work with us. So these are the early adopters that are using our design tool kit to build their applications.

So currently, we have a development kit and APIs for people to use our kit and develop their own applications with 3D skeletal integration-- like in Unity 3D on iOS-- to develop their own apps. And we have the API to support this kind of development. And the goal is we will be able to ramp up different applications based on our hardware design by the end of this year.

There are two types of people that I see that would be the ideal partnership. One is people that already heavily rely on this type of information that we can gather, i.e., the 3D body movement. Not only like full body, but maybe partial body movement.

So if they already use tool kits to analyze these movements, we want to be able to bring them to the next step of equipment or hardware so they can utilize our technology to bring the existing experiment setup outside of the lab.

One example is if you go to the best sports performance center, they always have a room like where we are right now with a lot of cameras. And top athletes go there every day and measure their movement, which is very different from going out in the field and measuring things on the field in real time. So I think the first type of partnership are companies, industry, research labs that are already heavily rely on equipment that's the size of this room and want to bring it outside of the lab to do the same type of studies.

The second type of partnerships are companies who have never used this type of system before but have either part of the business or part of their production or part of the everyday operation with a lot of movement. This could be a factory.

So if you have factory workers with different types of skill sets or the craftsmanship, say, then we can use these wearable platforms to analyze the style of craftsmanship and transfer these type of styles of movement. Or you can use that to analyze the level of fatigue or stress that your job is applying on your body and do some kind of analysis to see who is best fit for what position or how much break time should you have in the course of a day during the same work shift.

So these are the type of applications that we think is really useful for the industry, like for the insurance industry, for workers comp. It's not yet applied in the real world. And we're really interested in this type of collaboration that can bring something that used to be thought as something that's difficult into your everyday life. So essentially for everyone.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NAN-WEI GONG: So we aim to be this platform for many, many different industry segments. But what's unique about figur8 is, starting from day one, we worked with hospitals, we worked with sports science doctors. So the system is built to be HIPAA compliant, which means we are treating all the information we gathered as medical records. So the privacy is protected given all the protocols that's already existing in the market.

Well, I graduated from [INAUDIBLE] Media Lab and there's a lot of emphasis on how we bring a group of very different people to work on the same thing at the same time, and that where the real innovation really comes from.

So at figur8, we actually bring on a lot of different people and it's kind of like-- I like the philosophy of the Media Lab. When we started working on this product, it's not just an engineer thinking about an engineering solution. But rather we involved the doctors, we talked with many, many different customers, sports teams, physical therapists or athletes and we created a product based on users' needs.

And I think that's how I see innovation, is how do I bring my expertise into other industry segments? I personally didn't come from the medical industry or in the sports segment, but I have the expertise that can help them to bring their need into everybody's hands. And that's how I see innovation should be and that's where we are at at figur8, with a lot of collaboration from different areas.

So I think what's so special about our company is we have a great group of engineers on top of the scientific background that we have among our teams. So I personally have experience bringing things from just a prototype to production, and many of our team members have the same experience. So as a startup, we are hardware focused and we have the best hardware team and also the devices in its class.

[MUSIC PLAYING]