January Update
almost 7 years ago – Sat, Jan 20, 2018 at 03:11:20 PM

Hey Backers! 

Our January update is live - you can check the post out on our blog.

This time we'll be focusing on the engineering prototypes we just received - doing a full design review of how all the features came together, what worked/didn't, and what remains to be done in the next iterations. 

The prototype looks and feels amazing. Together with our factory we’ve identified several minor changes we want to make moving forward, which will get ironed out in the next iteration. We’re running a couple experiments with the next batch to nail down certain electrode decisions (namely, around the upper mechanism and the earcups). These should be the final design changes, yielding our golden sample in the next few weeks. Our timeline is still set to start shipping in April. 

Make sure to check the update out - there you'll find the first ever pictures of our engineering prototype! 

As always, please share this update, leave us any comments, and reach out on social media @thinkmindset :)

Lots of love!

- The Mindset Team

November Update
almost 7 years ago – Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 10:30:08 PM

Hey Backers! 

Our November update is live - you can check it out on the Mindset Blog. Lots of great stories this time! 

Production is coming along well – we are assembling our engineering prototypes in the next couple weeks. We’ll send out pictures when we have some.

The update below is a series of stories, case studies, and examples of the complexities we’ve been dealing with over the past few months. Hopefully you get a laugh out of it all, and learn a little about the hardware design process!

Let us know in the comments whether you like this style of update, focusing on the productions process rather than the results. The more feedback you give, the better we'll know what to share with you! 

From all of us in the Mindset team, we want to wish everyone a happy holiday season – here’s to an amazing 2018 filled with fun, happiness, and incredible focus!

Much love,

- The Mindset Team

October Update
about 7 years ago – Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 11:00:07 PM

Hey Backers! 

With November in full swing, our latest monthly update is ready! 

We're going to do something a little different this time - we're hosting our updates on our blog at www.thinkmindset.com. You can follow this link to access our October update.

This gives us a little more freedom to play around with the format of the updates, and embed some interesting stuff. Kickstarter's update system is pretty limiting in the format of what you can upload, and don't allow for any variation/editing. We're going to experiment with different forms of content in the future, and our blog will be the central hub around which this spreads. 

For those that just want a brief read, we'll keep posting our TL;DR here as well. 

We started finalizing some of the critical components: the lower headband mechanism, the electronic stack, electrode parameter, etc. Engineering prototypes will be ready next month, after which the design will focus on small tweaks.

In parallel, we’ve been working on our app, which we’re now using while we work every day. We have questions below that we need your feedback on, so please take the time to give us your thoughts!

Design is still on schedule for April. This month we’ll be at the WeAreWearables event in Toronto November 29th, so please stop by if you’re in town!

Let us know what you think of the update in the comments on here, or on our blog. And while you're there, make sure to check out the other posts we've made!

What would you like us to write about in the future? Share your thoughts, so we can better share ours!

Much love,

- The Mindset Team

September Update
about 7 years ago – Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 01:33:45 AM

Hey Backers!  

September (and now, part of October) was awesome – we made a lot of really good progress we’re excited to share with you. This update will be dense.  

Let’s dive in!

Work in China is going great – meeting with the factory several times each week has sped up development significantly. We made lots of crucial changes to the industrial, mechanical, and electrical design that will improve comfort and signal quality – many pictures below. Part 1 of the audio tuning process – preliminary mechanical changes - has started. Our latest software tests have yielded 80% accuracy on our toughest experiment yet, which is very exciting! We were named CES innovation award honorees, and we’ll be boothing there in Vegas in January – please stop by! We’re currently raising investment, so please reach out if you have any contacts that may be interested in speaking to us. Unfortunately, necessary changes (and unavoidable Chinese New Year factory shutdown) have pushed the timeline – we will have our alpha units done and tested by end of December, tooling started in January, and shipping will start in April.

We mentioned in previous updates why it’s so important for our team to be in China: the speed of prototype iterations is incomparable. Over the last month that benefit has been more evident than ever.

Our weekly factory meeting takes place Monday at 2:30pm China time – David and Chris head to the plant and discuss the most recent changes, check out the development the team has made, and discuss any changes that we’ve made to the neurotech part of the design. This consistent reporting has been keeping the factory accountable to the deadlines they set – so far they haven’t missed any, which sets a very solid precedent for the future.

These sessions typically last 3 or more hours – long, details discussions on the finicky details that really hold the design together. We pull out our books, talk about design challenges and make decisions in our expertise. Taking a product from prototype to market-ready isn’t easy, but we’ve been blown away by the level of professionalism and sophistication of the team we’re working with.

We want to give you a glimpse into the changes that are happening through this process:

As we develop the product, we figured it would be interesting for our backers to further understand the various design concerns driving the decisions and changes we make.

At the core, we are making a product that has a high quality, reliable sound experience, while being comfortable to wear. However, these are merely universal concerns for companies building headphones – Grandsun, our manufacturers, have become experts in tackling these challenges.

Focusing on Mindset-specific issues, they simplify to:  

• The product must be able to record high quality EEG data and be robust to real-life settings  
• The product must be both functional and comfortable for everyone

The first point was tackled by designing custom electrodes, connected to an advanced circuitry that amplifies the EEG part of the signal, and filters out the noise. This is step 1 in ensuring that what our algorithms detect is truly concentration in your brain, not an artifact from the electronic noise around. Designing this amplifier (typically referred to in EEG as “active electrodes”) has been evolving for the past 6 months, and we continue to make small tweaks to shield, isolate, and de-noise the signal. These amplifier circuits, in medical, usually cost on the order of $40 each (so $200 for the whole headset – yikes!). Chris has been having a ball optimizing his way to getting comparable signal quality, for a price that makes sense.

In addition to the circuitry, we need to ensure that electrodes have the proper material and finish. Because the electrodes are in direct contact with the skin, the materials need to be chosen carefully as to not react with substances like sweat or gel. This would cause the electrode to corrode and signal quality would drop over time. Grandsun is equipped with several corrosion, humidity, rain, and mechanical fatigue simulator machines, which we’ll be using to test our alpha prototypes.

The second point is quite interesting. Our headphones are quite particular in the sense that electrodes must establish a stable contact with the head of our users, despite the fact that different people have very different head shapes. Most headphones adjustment are only based on user’s head width and height. However, in our particular case, we are also concerned with the curvature of the top of the head. We need to make sure that our headphone band conforms to the various head curvature out there, which can vary dramatically. In the spring this year, we measured hundreds of head shapes and curvatures directly from MRI data to understand how they vary across an adult population. Based on these empirical results, we designed a mechanism embedded in the headphones that adapts in real-time to your head shape to make sure that all electrodes are touching properly and with equal force. This is beneficial both from a comfort perspective, because force is distributed equally on the three top electrodes, but also in terms of signal quality because it prevents poor electrode contact.

Adapting this to Grandsun’s design standards and trade secrets has been the focus on mechanical for the past month.

One of the big decisions in determining the comfort of a headphone is the clamping force – how strongly the ear cups grip your head on the side, in order to isolate sound and stay firmly on your head. While we can’t share the numbers (it’s a trade secret!), Grandsun shared with us the result of years of testing on the ideal clamping force in a headphone.

The goal, then, was to tweak our design to hit that standard. We played around with a few different ideas, and tried some printed prototypes to get a sense of the resulting look and feel, and chose what would be the best compromise. We’re really happy with how the shape maintains the sleekness of the original design, while being very evidently better optimized for fitting your head.

You can see the old shape in green, superimposed over the new shape. By bringing the armbands inward at the corners, the band curves around your head much more closely, clamping with more even force. It’s surprising what a difference a small change makes!

The next step in turning the industrial design into a manufacturable prototype was to separate the top band into two individual parts, which are held by screws and tightened together using a metal clip at each end. This shows you the way it will look under the fabric covering the top band. This change results in two much simpler parts that can be injection molded. In addition, a slot was added at the middle of the top band to relieve stresses in the material due to bending of the headphones.

The electrode positioning is posing an interesting engineering challenge. On one end, the headphones must be able the fit most heads while keeping structural integrity. On the other hand, we need to maximize the distance between the three electrodes to ensure we are recording from the electrodes a signal that is as different as possible from each other. This increases the quality of prediction of our algorithms. As we write this update, we are working with the manufacturer to make the yellow band (shown below) longer, to spread the electrodes further. The difference will likely be as small as 5mm, but every little bit counts!

Through the design process, we realized that the earcup pivot, which is located below the center of the cup, was causing the headphones to be less comfortable. What ended up happening is that as you wear the headphones, because the pivot center is too low, the ear cups would be pushing harder on your head above the ear than below the ear. This uneven pressure would make the headphones uncomfortable over long periods of time. In response to this, the simplest solution was to shift the pivot center so that it is coincident with the middle of the cup, along the height.

The focus on the electronics is still on the EEG-centric portion. Now that we have the mechanical portion sketched out, we’re working on the problem of fitting each chipset (amplification, data acquisition, microphones, Bluetooth, ANC, and all the rest) somewhere in the headphones.

For EEG, it’s important that the amplifiers be as close to the electrodes as physically possible. We’re exploring a design right now that has the amplifiers spread out through the headphone at each of the electrode locations, traveling through wires to a central processing board either in the top band or in the ear cups. We’re testing in parallel the effects of shielding, of coaxial wires, of battery and ground plane isolation, and other phenomena have on the signal quality. This is all evolving towards the milestone of getting the first full-fledged units out.

Grandsun’s portion of the design – the ANC, the Bluetooth, and the microphones – have not started, since they’re inherently less complicated. Once the wiring and EEG parts have been completed, getting the digital part of the board to work (which Grandsun has done hundreds of times in other headphones) will be quick.

A huge part of audio design, in fact, is not the choice of drivers: it’s the tuning.

Tuning audio means changing mechanical parts of the ear cup, in order to optimize how the sound bounces off the inside of the cup, and travels towards your ear. The size, shape, and material used will change which frequencies resonate and which dampen, which has a dramatic effect on the overall experience. That warm, resonant, heavy-yet-crisp sound that we associate with high quality headphones doesn’t happen on its own!

Preliminary changes to the internal shape of the cups are being applied as we speak. The goal of these changes is to improve active noise-cancelling capabilities and ensure proper sound quality. We’re leveraging our Grandsun’s expertise to help us design the internal shape of the cups to provide the proper sound signature.

Once the engineering prototypes are fully built and tested, they will be sent from Shenzhen to Shanghai, where a team of acoustic engineers from Onkyo will test and tune the product. Then, the final step will be to send the product to Japan, at their headquarters to have the expert acoustic engineers, called the “golden ears,” do the final inspection and tweaks. This process takes 3 to 4 iterations, so we’re starting early.

Having 3 people full time on software, with complimentary expertise in data science, neuroscience, and AI, has significantly sped up progress on the software. While we don’t want to divulge too many details about how the algorithm works just yet (since that’s our secret sauce after all!), we wanted to talk about our latest test results.

This month we put together a cheap and dirty prototype, using dry electrodes and our latest electronics. For all intents and purposes, this is identical to how our final product will be, minus the headphone part.

We used this device to collect data from people around the HAX office and our homes, performing a few real-world work tasks: reading textbooks, and listening to online lectures. We recorded during these sessions their level of engagement, and any time their mind wandered, distracting them from their task.

We then ran our algorithms over the data in a different way: we would use one user’s data to try and predict the distraction in a completely separate user. This is the gold standard we’ve been aiming for: leveraging the power of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and large-scale data, to learn the ground truth of what concentration looks like in the brain, rather than simply recognizing a single user’s patterns.

The results were beyond amazing: 80% of the time, our algorithms caught the user’s distraction, despite having never seen the user before. We’re so incredibly excited about these results – this is by far the clearest indication we’ve had that we’re heading in the right direction.

Now, we want to be clear: this isn’t the be-all end-all. There’s still a lot of work to do: making sure that this trend generalized to the thousands of users we’ll have using the product, optimizing the feedback we send to keep you in the zone, and a dozen other problems that still need to be solved. We need to test more people, in more settings, doing more tasks, before we can claim victory - there’s a lot to do on our end.

But at the same time… WOOHOO!

We have some amazing news: Mindset was just named a 2018 CES Innovation Award Honoree!

We’re incredibly excited to receive this award – being named among some of the most incredible technology products of this year is a huge honor. This news is not yet public, so mums the word, but we wanted to share it with you first!

We’ll be boothing at CES this year – if any of you are in Vegas early January, we’d love if you could stop by, try out Mindset, and share your story with us!

Our CEO Jacob is currently back in Canada, where he’ll be fundraising over the next few months. Beyond the Kickstarter, we want Mindset to become a huge success – that means more features, new products, and fast growth. To speed up the process, we’re raising a seed round to help expand the team, and push more development.

If any of you know someone interested in investing in Mindset, have any connections in the venture capital industry, or even can lend a couch in cities like San Francisco, New York, or Vancouver, please send us a private message – let’s help Mindset grow together!

Having now spent a month working closely with our manufacturers, we have a much better idea of what a realistic timeline for delivery looks like. Unfortunately, it’s very unlikely at this point that we’ll be starting to ship in December.

The reality is that it probably would have been possible to ship in December – had we simply taken the system we had, thrown it into a headphone, and called it a day, we would have shipped on time. But given the option between delivering an average headphone that reads brainwaves, and an incredible headphone that improves your concentration and that you use for the next 3+ years, we chose that latter.

By making this decision we know the end product will sound better, fit more comfortably, and read a better signal. This due diligence should also attenuate the risk of future issues, as we mentioned in this update on the manufacturing process.

Our current timeline puts alpha unit production as starting this month. We will iterate on the engineering prototypes 1-2 times, to freeze the design by December, and produce our final engineering prototypes in time for CES.

After this, tooling, DVT, and mass production will take place in early 2018. There is also the unavoidable loss of Chinese New Year, a time where most business shut down for ~3 weeks. We have timed the production cycle to allow us to testing the software, application, and final off-tool prototypes – shipping will start in April, and continue over the following months for the first 5000 units.

We’ve confirmed this schedule with our factory, and they’re comfortable with the time that gives them to get the right certifications, perform the 100+ tests on the first batch, tune the audio and ANC, and source the EEG-centric components. These next few months will be critical, and definitely not easy, but we’re ready to make this happen.

It’s game time.

We’ve been working over the past few months to make Mindset a brand you’re excited to rep. Behind the scenes we’ve built a new brand identity, website and are now taking pre-orders on our own website.  

We also hear your requests to review the product and appreciate your excitement - we’ve started accepting requests to review and feature the product in the future. So if you have a blog, a big social presence or are a super savvy influencer, reach out to us on social!  

Congrats on making it all the way through this update! 

Do you have any comments or questions about the design work we’re doing? Our tech team would love to chat! Post your questions in the comments below, and we’ll help clarify!

Much love :)

- The Mindset Team

August Update
about 7 years ago – Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 11:11:54 PM

Hey Backers!

Another month, another update. This one will be brief as we’re midway through a couple interesting developments that we don’t want to dive into too soon.

Our new website is live – you can check it out at thinkmindset.com! Negotiations with our factory finally concluded, which means the whole team will be heading back to Shenzhen to start working on our alpha units. While negotiations took longer than expected, we’re still keeping the same timeline. The team is up to 8 people now: new members are joining the Mindset team on electronics, neuroscience, and marketing. We’ll be sharing some cool information about the development progress with in-factory pictures next update.

After much work and deliberation, our new website is live! You can check it out at thinkmindset.com!

We’re really happy with how it turned out. We’ll be using our new platform to host our blog, continue pre-sales, and provide a fresh face for the company. Please share any and all feedback on the page, so we can continue to improve it! And of course, please share the page with your friends, family, and anyone else you think may be interested in Mindset!

A special thanks goes out to Joel Blair at Detraform for his amazing work designing and executing on this piece of the project!

 A few of you have reached out requesting an invoice for backing the campaign. While we can’t provide explicit invoices until the headphones ship, we can provide receipts:

Follow the link in your BackerKit survey, and navigate to the confirmation page. From here, we’re told by BackerKit that if you print the page directly in the web browser, the resulting page will be formatted to look like a receipt. This should be sufficient for any expense claims. 

If you have any problems with this, send a shout to our support team at backerkit, and they’ll help you with the process. Let us know if this trick works for you!

We’re pleased to announce that Mindset will be attending the Consumer Electronics Show once again this year!

CES is an incredible opportunity for us to show off our brand, and our latest prototypes to people from all over the world. We had a blast last year at our humble little booth, and the whole team is psyched to be able to attend again, bigger and better than before.

If you’re planning on attending, come visit us at Eureka Park, booth number 51468!

Once again, the Mindset team is growing - we’re excited to welcome Chris, Annie, and Adrien to the team!

Chris brings over 35 years of experience in electronics – from analog to embedded and everything in between. He’s has experience in EEG systems, and is going to head-manning the electronics design, testing, and production moving forward. 

Annie is a young vibrant grad who will be taking over our social media accounts. With experience working in Beijing, Australia and now Canada, she brings the perfect balance of east meets west to our team. Please say “Hi!” on our Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Adrien brings 7 years of experience and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, during which he studied how to measure attention and mind wandering using EEG. He’s going to be leading the science team, and working with our data scientists to make Mindset’s braintech the best in its class.

The expertise our new members bring is unparalleled, and already we’re seeing the fruits of their labor contributing to the quality of our core tech. Our new teammates are helping push the product and business to be better and better. We’ll be sharing some pictures and details about the design work next month!

Last month we mentioned that the negotiations with our factories were making progress – we had narrowed the choice to two candidates, and we were actively working with them on some important details related to pricing, quality, responsibility, and timeline. While the process wasn’t quick, we’re happy to say that the negotiations are now done, and we’re ready to dive into the next phase of the design process.

Naturally, more design means back to China. Next week the whole team will be heading back to Shenzhen, where we will kick off the project with our new partner. We’ve already discussed each part of the design very thoroughly, so we’re excited to see what this next month of work, waist deep in the factory floor, will yield. Our schedule aims to have the first alpha units ready in just over 1 month.

The negotiations definitely took longer than predicted. Part of that delay is attributable to communication difficulties from Canada to China, and part is simply the complexity and magnitude of details required to make the deal happen. This was a process we were nervous to speed through too quickly – in retrospect, we think we made the right decision being deliberate and thorough about this step. Internally we've spent this time acquiring test data on our latest prototype, performing tests on the electrodes, and developing a complete new iteration of the electronics, so no time was lost!

Bringing the team back to China for the next few months will go a long way towards speeding up the back and forth emails between us and the factory, which we expect will expedite the next few steps. As such, right now we’re still working on the same timeline. By next month, the first iteration of the engineering prototypes will help us confirm this schedule more concretely.

These coming months are going to be a blast – enough working in the office, it’s time to get our hands dirty!

As always, feel free to share any comments, questions, or thoughts in the comments. We’ll be sure to share pictures from our upcoming trip on social media, so stay tuned! 

Much love! 

- The Mindset Team