IEOR 185 Private Blog

This week, we conducted a lot of market research regarding our product and found out some good and bad news in our field. On one hand, we have received lots of valuable information from UC Davis that allows us to really get into the finer points of developing our product, but on the other hand, we have found out that there are some existing companies in this field that do similar work. One of the companies that we are particularly worried about is Empatica. They develop a wristband that uses similar sensors as our wearable to measure emotions (note their name - empathy). However, while we may target Autism or the general population, Empatica targets patients with epilepsy specifically. As such, though our products are similar, it is possible we could outmaneuver Empatica by focusing on a different market or by championing the technology for the public at large. In order to become presentation-ready, I think we need to focus on how our company is different from the rest of the comp...

For this blog post, we have been asked to answer the question: What keeps us up at night regarding our project? I think the factor that keeps me up the most at night regarding our project is how to properly go to market with our product. As our patent relates to Autism, one of the paths we can take is to market the wearable towards individuals with ASD. One of the problems with this path is that it severely limits our potential market base, and also may begin to stigmatize our product. This would be quite unfortunate, as the purpose of our product is to help people understand their emotions, not to make them feel cornered into a medical prognosis. An alternative that we have discussed is making the product available for children with ASD in schools. While this does in fact limit our market further, the smallness of this market may serve to help us as it makes it easier for us to establish milestones and quickly expand to corner the entire market. Other options that we have discuss...

In this blog, I will talk about our UC Davis Patent, as I am very excited about the potential it has to be commercialized. However, I do not have a lot of specific information available to talk about, as the patent is currently pending. We have reached out to UC Davis for more information about the patent, and have in fact received a response from their IP lawyers about how to move forward with learning more about the patent. Hopefully, by next week, I will have more information for you about the patent specifics. Regardless, our patent seems to revolve around a wearable device that uses Galvanic Skin Response (a sweat sensor), Heart Rate Sensors, and Heart Rate Variability Sensors in order to determine information about the wearer’s emotional responses to internal and external stimuli. According to the patent’s description, the wearable that was developed for this device is a glove that can be worn and has the sensors embedded in the device. The inventors of the device have said...

This week, our team settled on a new set of patents to build our startup off of. As I mentioned earlier, we decided last week to move away from the CRISPR patent and have spent our time since scouring through the UC Technology Transfer website looking for new patents to study. We have decided on two patents, one from UC Berkeley and one from UC Davis. The UC Berkeley patent focuses on a bodily sensor array that measures sweat profiles, while the UC Davis patent focuses on a wearable that measures various bodily processes to help Autism patients. We hope to use these patents together to enhance each other and build a health and fitness wearable that enhances people’s lives. Our developed wearable may focus on helping the wearer better determine their emotions - we have not figured out the specifics yet. One of our first tasks is to figure out a market to target with our wearable. Currently, we think that we could start out by targeting individuals with Autism, and then broad...

This week, my team and I decided to make a pivot away from the CRISPR patent and towards a different patent. Though we have spent a considerable amount of time researching the patent and discussing business propositions regarding the patent, we have ultimately decided that a startup around the patent is not financially or commercially viable - such a startup requires far too much capital and domain knowledge for college students without advanced training in biology to understand. However, we have been looking hard for other patents to pick up as our primary patents.  A number of patents look particularly interesting to me. As a CS student, I’m particularly drawn to computer-related technologies that I believe have high potential to be commercialized. Some of the patents I’m personally interested in pursuing with my team are ' Dynamic Searchable Encryption with Minimal Data Leakage’  https://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu/NCD/24053.html  and ' First Practica...

Week 6 Hi, My name is Kush Rastogi and this is my private blog for IEOR 185. To this point, my team, Pied Piper, has been working well together, but our project is facing some major hurdles. In the past few weeks, we decided on using the famous CRISPR patent championed by Professor Doudna, but we have had difficulty reaching out to the CRISPR team for more comments on the patent and how we could potentially turn it into a business. This is a little concerning to me as it seems many other teams have already selected their patent and have the wishful blessings of the professors whose research the patent came from.  However, just this week, I was able to talk to individuals from Berkeley IPIRA who handle all inquiries related to valuable Berkeley IP. According to these individuals, a company based off of the CRISPR patent would need to have significant capital to begin with, and therefore any startup involved with this work would most likely not be able to provide any th...