Chris Hoyd 0:09

Welcome back to Product in Healthtech. I'm Chris Hoyd, principal at Vynyl. Today, I'm joined by John Golden, the CEO of Vital Neuro, which is a company that spent nine years developing an EEG-enabled headphone device that uses real time brain monitoring to create personalized neuroresponsive music. In our conversation, we explore how Vital Neuro is addressing anxiety and stress across diverse populations, from reducing absenteeism in call centers by 13% to helping patients achieve sedation level relaxation in medical procedures without pharmaceutical intervention. John shares insights into their patented technology, the challenges of building consumer grade clinical EEG, and their vision for integrating brain state management into everyday life. Let's dive in.

Chris Hoyd 0:57

John, thanks so much for being here today. I wonder if we can start by just diving right in. Can you give us an overview of what vital neuro is?

John Golden 1:07

Yeah Chris, it's pleasure to talk to you and your audience. You know Vital Neuro is really a lifestyle that we want to bring through our technology. We're all overwhelmed, and life is very challenging, and our goal is to be able to give you that peace, that sanctuary, that sense of control, and help you control where your mind is, so you can be your best and most present. So it's a technology that enables that.

Chris Hoyd 1:34

And what is the modality for that technology, or at least the primary modality, what does it look like and feel like?

John Golden 1:40

Yeah, today's manifestation of that is a simple bluetooth headphone with some EEG sensors that looks really cool, right? Not like typical neurofeedback that looks like a colander with spark plugs on your head. We really want you to be able to wear it anywhere at any time, and it interfaces with a mobile app, and that mobile app connects us to the cloud so we can do real-time EEG monitoring to be able to create really custom music for you.

Chris Hoyd 2:05

So just by way of helping the Product in Healthtech community get to know you, can you talk us through your background and how you became CEO of vital nerve?

John Golden 2:14

Well, I'm certainly not the inventor of Vital Neuro. There's some people that preceded me, like Dr Kamran Fallahpourand Alex Doman, these two gentlemen came together, and really the genesis is Kamran Fallahpour and what he had done, he's a clinical psychologist in New York City, and he had seen things to his practice, and then partnered with Alex and him and Alex had this idea. From there, I was invited and met with them after exiting a business called Exos, and a gentleman by the name Mark Hadus, introduced us. And I was so grateful to Mark to making that introduction. And you know, now there's a whole team of us that have kind of transformed Vital to where it is today.

Chris Hoyd 2:58

So let's talk a little bit about that transformation. So it started, you know, a handful of years ago as a good idea, right, sort of supported by a clinical experts, experience, and maybe intuition. So it became a fledgling startup. And talk to me about the journey. Where are you guys seeing traction? Where is the company now? How are you feeling about where things are headed?

John Golden 3:21

Chris, we were that typical startup overnight success, right? So we're about nine years into that journey, and I've been about seven years of that journey, and the transformation has really been you know about trying to be efficacious, about what we do. Clinical-grade EEG is a hard thing to do to make it cool and truly mobile and be able to take it anywhere you want, and frictionless is an art form, and it's taken a lot of repetition to get there, a lot of practice, lot of iteration, and so we've really wanted to perfect that. And then our goal was to learn the voice of our customer. Right? Most people aren't interested in talking about their mental health or talking about the challenges that they're dealing with. Though it's more open today than it's ever been, it's still fairly taboo, or, you know, not, not as open as you would hope it would be. So our goal was to understand what did people really want and need. They didn't call and raise their hand and say 'I need brain training. I'm going to run out and get brain training - give me some neuro feedback'. So we really want to understand what they did and needed. So we spent, actually, the last two years understanding that and knowing that they're looking for something that gave them the capacity to be their best in a frictionalist use it anywhere environment. Once we understood that voice now we're actively and we've been in the market selling now for about a year. It's been a great transformation for us. We're excited. We're getting tremendous traction. And, you know, we have a direct to consumer, and also we sell to physicians today, and then we've got some really key partnerships that are developing,

Chris Hoyd 4:59

You I think, an. Initially described it as a lifestyle, sort of supported by by the music, by the device, by the EEG. Can you talk a little bit about the outcomes that you're starting to see and the patients that are using it?

John Golden 5:16

For sure. And you know, the user of Vital is, is patients and consumers of all walks of life. We have children all the way through, you know, senior citizens, and they use it both personally and professionally. And again, when we say lifestyle, that's really important, as common as you would wear a headphone or EarPods, that's what we want you to use vital, right? And, and the outcomes, we measure the outcomes, kind of in three categories. The first one is in the impact for your mental performance. So we look at, how do we look at like a GAD-7 survey? So how do we do against depression/anxiety? How do we help you with your sleep? How do we help you for your readiness? So we look at those things, and I mean, again, everybody will quote different numbers. You know, we're very proud of what we've been able to do. We'll typically see a 40+% reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms when we've gone, gone into populations, and we've been in medical situations, we've been in enterprises, and we've dealt with direct people every day, and we've tested with really some interesting populations. We've done a study with Southwest Airlines flight attendants, we've done nurses, first responders, we've done teachers, so really interesting. And we've seen consistent results in that really improving sleep. When you're able to improve the sleep of a flight attendant, that's a pretty amazing thing, because their sleep they're sleeping at a different place all the time. So that first measure is kind of in that mental health sort of capacity. The second thing is, we look at engagement, how often does somebody use it? Right? It's one thing. You know, we all have a treadmill that's sitting in the basement somewhere with maybe some clothes hanging on it. So the question is, how do we get to make sure that somebody uses this thing right? And so for our average user, they run about a 14-15, minute session. That's how long it takes. Now they can choose to run 5 or 30 minutes, and but it's 14 minutes. The average user runs about 20 sessions a month. Some more, when they're maybe in a crisis or going through a difficult time in life, they'll use it more and sometimes a little less frequently, but they come back to it. So usage is important. Most of our patients and most of our clients are using it first for relaxation, then focus, then sleep, then pain management, and our biggest growing category is around sedation and to be able to get somebody to a level of Valium in about 11 minutes. And that's in our pre procedure, when you're going in for, like, some sort of medical procedure, which we can touch on. And then the third measure we get into is ROIs. So return on investment that we do, we've, like, Call Centers. How do we drive productivity? How do we improve absenteeism? So across our call centers, we've reduced absenteeism by 13% that's basically giving every call center employee one extra day of work for their employer, right? That's really powerful, being able to help them and make them more productive. We looked at sales metrics, improvement in sales, and then obviously we look at in the medical space, are we able to get somebody to relaxation? And we've hit the gold standard, and that we can show a statistically significant neurophysiological change at the same time with great patient score self reported, they match. So those would be the three categories around mental health measures, like a GAD-7, then we get into usage, and then ROI.

Chris Hoyd 5:17

So John, what do you say to folks who are skeptical of some of these claims, especially due the breadth of what Vital Neuro is able to address? Yeah,

John Golden 5:17

like a lot of coaching and biofeedback stuff. There's a lot of "woo-woo" into that, as they say, right? So it's like, I'm a big biohacker myself, and do a lot of things, and there's not always a lot of great science and but with Vital we're actually measuring your brain activity real time, so we have that information. So we can not only just demonstrate by asking you a question, Do you feel better? More focused, more relaxed, we can actually demonstrate it in the results that we gather from the EEG and what we're seeing. So for me, the proof is in the data. Proof is in the numbers. And you know, the resiliency that people have, and they keep coming back with our data: win-win.

Chris Hoyd 9:36

So it's and I just want to kind of double click on the nature of the impact of it. So is it? It relaxes you, it kind of puts you in a flow state. Is it meditative?

John Golden 9:48

All the above, right? So it depends on your desire. So you come in with a current state of mind. You could be unfocused, you could be very stressed out, or you could be sleepy. And you have a desired state, which would be to become more alert, maybe get into executive function, state of flow. Maybe I need to fall asleep. Maybe I just need to calm down and get the noise out of my head - it's just overwhelming, and I can't make a decision. Somebody asks you, What do you want for dinner? And you're like, leave me alone. I don't want to make another decision. As I said, we're all kind of our new title is, I'm the vice president of being busy, right? And we all feel that. So I think you know, what vital is actually doing is helping you alter the your state of mind. What it's doing is it's reading the electrical signature of your brain. There's plenty of science out there around neurofeedback about what parts of the brain are stimulated, over-stimulated or under-stimulated based on your state of mind. We're able to read that real time. We're able then to compose unique music for you in the moment, that's called Neuro-responsive music. And we can transform we can down regulate or up regulate parts of your brain your electrical signature to get you to the desired state. That's what we do, and that's neurofeedback, and that's been very effective. When you go into clinicians offices, there's 1000s of people that do a great job of delivering that. Our goal was to take it out of the clinic, right? Because it's when you have crisis. Yesterday, I had a very tough set of meetings, and, you know, it was like, I was like, ready to break, and I could step out, put the Vital headset on for 10 minutes, and I was calm and collected in my space. And so, you know, when you have to go to a clinic, you got to schedule it. Well, who can schedule anxiety? Who can schedule stress, right? So we wanted Vital to be there when you needed it, not when you can schedule it. And so that's been really important to us in what we've tried to do for people. So we're actually in the moment, takes about 90 seconds to get your baseline, understand where your brain is, and then we start to transform you. The more you use it, the deeper you go, the faster you transition, and the more stable you are, and so that's what we're trying to do.

Chris Hoyd 12:05

Very cool. Okay, so I like that you're also bringing so much rigor to how you're tracking outcomes and how you're using that to help sell into clinics, it sounds like so can you talk a little bit about what the pitch is to clinicians and how they're seeing it, maybe particularly in the case of sedation that you mentioned?

John Golden 12:27

So I think the definition of clinic first, I want to clarify. I'm not a neuroscientist. I'm not a medical doctor. You know, my background is technology and operations, and with a lot of lot of scars, both orthopedic surgery scars and a lot of life scars. And I have a great team of folks I get to work with, as prior mentioned, Dr Kamran Fallahpour and our whole team. Our first primary market is what we call the medical space. Not that Vital is a medical device. It is a consumer grade device, as far as it's registration, and we like that space, but what we do is we go into physicians offices. And so think about office-based surgery that's becoming more and more. There's clearly almost a billion of these procedures done in the United States alone each year. And so we're talking about in the ophthalmology, you're getting cataracts, Lasix, glaucoma, procedures. Oral Surgery, think about all the MRIs and all the different tests that we have. That's a highly stressed, anxiety ridden environment for people, and as we get more and more of those, it's harder to do. And so we target physicians who want to elevate their patient experience, and that's how we approached it, right? But because we're clinical grade, we can go beyond that. So when we talk about the clinician, we're talking about physicians who's an ophthalmologist or an oral surgeon or a plastic surgeon or Urology. And what Vital does is Vital takes on the burden of relaxing that patient without or in partnership with sedation, as I mentioned earlier, we can get somebody to a level of Valium like, think of the BIS scale, getting to an 80 or less, giving into the 70s, in the high 60s, we can get somebody there in about 11 minutes consistently. So what does that do for the physician's office, they have a relaxed patient for the physician staff, who's already overwhelmed and being asked to do a lot of things, they now can focus on those other things, because the patient is sitting there completely relaxed. And Chris, as you know, we all go to a doctor the morning, they're on schedule. By the afternoon, they're an hour behind, and now you're waiting for your procedure and you're waiting longer. Vital can create that relaxation, but we give productivity, that's the ROI impact to the staff. We take a burden off. And more importantly, for the physician, they can look at the Vital on the iPad, and they can understand the level of sedation that that patient is in with Vital and they can see if they're fully relaxed. We call that being Vitalized. And if they're Vitalized, they know they don't need to sedate them again or even in the first place, and they know the patient's in a comfortable, good place to start the procedure. We have physicians using Vital pre procedure, intra procedure and post procedure, and it's just creating a much more pleasant experience for the for the patient, and a much more productive and easier experience on the doctor.

Chris Hoyd 15:26

In a minute, I'm going to ask you where things are headed in the next few years. But first, I want to talk a little bit about what the product development process has been like for you guys. Was it, you know, I think you mentioned you've been with the company for about seven years. When you joined, was there clarity around what this device was going to be, or have you learned a lot as you've, you know, kind of embarked on this journey? I'm curious if there's any, you know, surprising or counterintuitive learnings that you guys have encountered as you've developed this product.

John Golden 15:58

Yeah, so I think we'd be the first startup company that didn't have any surprises if we didn't have surprises, right? So I always say that the list of unknowns is far longer than what we knew, right? And so the goal is a leader is trying to understand what are those critical unknowns, and how do we discover them over time, what sequence and controlling investment until you fully know what those unknowns are. And so we've tried to be very patient. It's not been easy, but we've tried to be very patient because we have both a hardware and a software component. And so we have the challenges of that, plus we have a new category, kind of a blue ocean space. And so all of that is been, a challenge for us as a team to be patient. We've had great advisors, great people to work with. The team at Vynyl that does our technology, software development engineering, our external partner who helps us on our mechanical engineering, all of our manufacturing - building that great team to make sure that it's a safe space to say we don't know what we don't know, but challenge ourselves to create a frictionless environment that's cool and effective, really being efficacious about the outcomes those have been kind of our north stars, to drive where we're at. And the complexity that we had a year and a half ago is is been replaced by simplicity, not because we got smarter, we just got more experienced. And so there's a sophistication that the Vynyl team and others have built behind the scenes that make us look simpler to the user, and that's always important. When I know I can hit that sweet spot and the customer says it's frictionless, they just slide the headphones on and press a button and go. We know we're there, and that's what we're approaching. We have a lot more to go, and we're excited about all the evolution that's coming in front of us, but right now, we're really excited about the space we're in.

Chris Hoyd 17:56

Yeah, it's an incredible accomplishment to you know have gotten, where you guys have gotten, and how you've launched, and the traction that you do have so far. So, yeah, let's turn and talk, you know, a bit about the next few years. How are you seeing, you know, the sort of future progression of the product and the company and the markets as you define this new category?

John Golden 18:17

Yeah, so I think, you know, I talk a lot about, you know, the body is the hardware and the brains the software, right? And the beautiful thing about the human is that we get to upgrade the software, just like Apple upgrades your iPhone every month to help you against viruses and give you new capabilities. Our goal in Vital is to help you protect against all the things that are going on, you know, you think about the evolution of AI. You think about the changes, societal changes, and the advancements of technology. All that puts a burden on our head, on our brain, our human operating system. So what's the tool? How do we equalize? How do we win in that environment, besides grit and perseverance and, you know, sucking it up, baby. You know, we got to give ourselves something, and that's what Vital is meant to do, is to give you that competitive advantage in this new world. And so that's what we're excited about exploring that. And so we have other form factors beyond the headphone. We have manufacturers in the medical space that are going to integrate Vital into the surgical tools in the surgical environment, we have other professions that are going to build Vital's IP into their tools and products, so it becomes more of an immersive experience. We also, through leveraging AI and some of the other capabilities, we're going to be able to deliver Vital lots of times without having to wear a headphone. There's some really profound things. And then ultimately, we believe that we can enable artists. Artists are going to be able to take a song that's commercially successful, and we're going to be able to flip a switch, be able to Vitalize that music so. Now they can not just create wonderful music that resonates with people, but moves people. They don't just respond to the music, but the music responds to them, and that's our Neuro-responsive music. So those are just some of the ways that we see this. I mean, we fully believe, you know, this world of connectedness and personalization. Like, you know, I wear a Whoop device myself, by the way, Whoop you can send my email to my email any kind of money you want to give me for recommending it, but you know you can, but I wear a Whoop device, and that allows me to collect body data, right? But Whoop is trying to guess my stress level, my strain level, Vital. Can give that imagine the power here, a year from now, when we combine the brain data Vital with the body data that people are getting, we're going to be able to create incredibly personalized, highly efficient, effective plans to help people transform themselves.

Chris Hoyd 20:54

John, it sounds like this, products, this lifestyle, can really address a wide range of issues, which is incredible. I'm curious how you've thought about the sort of differentiating IP that goes into Vital Neuro and you know, maybe if you can talk a little bit about the patents that you guys hold?

John Golden 21:15

Yeah, Chris, thank you. You know, first of all, Vital today we manufacture a headphone, and if all goes well, we manufacturing headphone right here in the US soon, which is exciting for us, but we also don't want to be in the manufacturing business long term, so we're constantly looking for partners to integrate our technology into their platform. But with that said, we do have a patent on the unique design of this headphone, right? So that is patented, and it's really important to make sure that, you know, it's one thing to capture EEG, it's another thing to be able to train the brain, and you've got to get specific spots. So a lot of people like to work on the forehead. That's a that's a decent way to capture EEG, and a lot of people do very well with that. But if you want to train the brain, you got to be able to capture the EEG in the spot you're trying to train so relaxes in the back of your head. For example, it's hard to train EEG from your forehead. So we have a patent on the design and then how we transform neurofeedback. We call it "neurofeedback on steroids". So typical neurofeedback is a way of taking EEG and then playing sounds and tones and frequencies that play to the brain more than the ear, to create the desired state. That's a great - lots of proof, lots of studies done in that science. And so what happens is, then you introduce ideas like operant conditioning, where you take things away to try to draw the brain back to the desired state you're looking at. Vital takes it one step further, and this is where our other patents come into play, and this is what we call Neuro-responsive music, our trademark definition. And what this gets into is that during your session, we're not just playing psycho-acoustically designed music or music through your ear, but we are actually understanding and monitoring your brain throughout and we're transforming that soundtrack, that music real-time, so that it's again, highly personalized to your brain, so you're not just listening to some sort of binaural beats or standard playlist that you might hear on a regular app. We're actually creating a playlist unique for you, a composition for you, Chris, that's how we can guarantee to get you to your desired state of mind, quickly, deeply and in a sustained way. And that's what we call "Neuro-responsive music".

Chris Hoyd 23:35

That's very cool. Can you talk a little bit about how you do that? Is that, you know, an AI-driven functionality that sounds incredible.

John Golden 23:44

So how do we do that? That's magic. That's magic, yeah. So that's the wonderful team and process. You know, Kamran Fallahpour was part of one of the largest studies. So you got to have a really good baseline of what baseline EEG looks like. You've got to have really good filtering of EEG. EEG is a very complicated thing. You also have to have the ability to amplify. You got to be able to have a closed loop system, to be able to pick up the signal process it real time, very fast. And then once you do that, you once you interpret what the state of mind is, you got to be able to then figure out what the customer, the client's frequency is, what's their resident frequency, or we call 'reward tone', what's their personalized reward tone? Once we capture that, then you need to feed it into a brain training process like operant conditioning. So it's a fairly complex process. That's where I said to you earlier, like we take this really sophisticated thing and make it simple, put a headphone on, press a button, and away it goes. But it's highly personalized, and so once we can get your frequency and we understand how your brain trains, we can zero in and then we leverage tools like AI and that to get smarter, more efficient. And to extend beyond the headphone, so you can listen to music while you sleep without having to have the headphone on. But that gives you a glimpse of kind of what's going on behind the scenes.

Chris Hoyd 25:10

John, thank you so much for joining us today. For everyone out in the Product in Healthtech community, how can they get into the vital neuro lifestyle? How can they find the headphones? Are they available for purchase? What's the easiest way to experience this?

John Golden 25:26

Yeah, I mean, obviously we saw it online www.vitalneuro.com and you can go there, or you can send us an email at [email protected] and we'd be happy to help you. But I think you know to sound less like a commercial. Even though I'm wearing somebody else's headphones, I should be wearing the Vital headphones. I would tell you that we're here for a mission, right? Like so Dr Kamran Fallahpour, he really wants to help people in pain, particularly kids with cancer. That's really important. There's populations today we reach out in the military and help people with PTSD and other TBI traumatic brain injuries that we really want to help. So we donate all of our demo headsets to these populations. We donate to the Ronald McDonald House. These are people that matter, and we all know we I know me. I use Vital three to four times every day, all right? It enables me to be what I am today, right? And we all need help, and some of us need more help than others. And so, you know, I always say in these if I get a chance, I'd like to say, if you know somebody that could really use the help that the noise in their head is too loud. They can't figure their way out. They're struggling. Vital can help. I'm not telling you it's answer to everything, but it'll give you at least a space to start to go do other things. It'll help. If you know of physicians who are innovators that are doing world class stuff, that are dealing with challenging cases recommend Vital to them, ask them to take a look, because we'd like to help them help their patients. So this is kind of my call to action to everybody is, you know, you're not used to somebody doesn't say, Hey, let's go buy brain training. Let's go do neuro feedback, right? That's not common, but I'm telling you, our job, our responsibility, is to bring this to everybody, because it can be that common, that easy. It might solve it for you. If it won't solve it for you, I guarantee it'll give you the capacity to figure out how to fully solve it.

Chris Hoyd 27:37

Thank you so much for joining us. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube or on our website, at Productinhealthtech.com if you have any ideas or suggestions on what you'd like to hear on a future episode, or if you'd like to be a guest, please just Shoot us an email at [email protected]