Team NeuroSmart
Stanford University
Making Stress Measurable
The Team
Melis Yilmaz Balban
• Co-Founder, NeuroSmart
• PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior, Harvard University (2015)
Emily Brown
• Co-Founder, NeuroSmart
• MBA, Stanford (2022)
Problem Sponsor
Army Research Labs (Dr. Garcia, Dr. Hoffing, and Dr. Ries)
Mentors
LTC Ed Cuevas (Defense Mentor), Rafi Holtzman (Business Mentor), and Dr. Danielle Cummings (Business Mentor)
Original Problem Statement
Military officers need a way to regulate their stress while making high-stakes decisions in order to reduce critical mistakes and potential lasting trauma.
Beneficiary Discovery Interviews
101
The Innovation
Team NeuroSmart is helping law enforcement agencies train and prepare for stressful situations. The H4D alumni team is developing a wearable technology capable of stress monitoring in order to train self-awareness and self-regulation in law enforcement personnel. The interdisciplinary team formed the startup to continue their work, incorporating members’ experience in neuroscience and business.
The NeuroSmart team was formed in the Spring 2021 term of the Stanford University Hacking for Defense course. The original team included neuroscientist Melis Yilmaz Balban (PhD ‘15) and finance professional Emily Casey Brown (MBA ‘22), who came together as a multi-disciplinary team to explore a problem that Melis had been researching prior to the course – stress monitoring.
Team NeuroSmart at Stanford University was originally tasked with “providing military officers a way to regulate their stress while making high-stakes decisions to reduce critical mistakes and potential lasting trauma.” Traditional Tactical Training, consisting of in-class tactical memorization leading straight to Close Quarters Combat (CQC), traditionally resulted in unexplained performance loss, a high attrition rate, critical mistakes, and lost lives. Paired with the Army Research Laboratory’s Dr. Garcia, Dr. Hoffing, and Dr. Ries as their sponsor, the team identified “optimal” and “suboptimal” states for decision-making using physiological and behavioral measurements in order to streamline optimal cognitive performance. NeuroSmart applied their idea of a stress-monitoring technology to Conventional Field Grade Officers, who needed to regulate their stress levels while making high-stakes decisions. One colonel with the Marine Corps told the team, “Self-regulation could help this group make better decisions, process information quicker and be more resilient in high stress situations.”
However, the team soon learned through discovery that their technology would not be a priority for Conventional Field Grade Officers, who faced funding and scalability challenges. Team NeuroSmart then switched focus to US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), particularly the 75th Ranger Regiment, which demonstrated a high willingness to experiment with technology, had a separate training pipeline, was public facing, and had significant funding resources.
With their initial target beneficiary circled, the team set off to explore environments where they could provide value and help this beneficiary. They soon realized that Close Quarters Combat training could be optimized, as it was common for soldiers to break down and not make the right decisions. Through beneficiary discovery with Army officers, Team NeuroSmart concluded that simply gathering biometric data with their technology was not enough – the interpretation of the data was the actual pain point. One of the team’s beneficiary discovery interviewee even went so far as to say, “The Army has too much data and doesn’t know what to do with it.”
Consequently, the team then developed key metrics for improving CQC performance that not only recorded biometric data, but gave recommendations based on the analysis of this data. To this advancement, a trainer at Mountain View Police Department said, “Connecting the data to shot accuracy and threat response is invaluable.”
Following the conclusion of the course, Team NeuroSmart identified a new group with a more acute need for their product than military officers – law enforcement agencies. Currently, the NeuroSmart startup provides technology that monitors emotional and cognitive stress during scenario- based training sessions and maps a law enforcement officer’s stress prior, during, and after critical decisions in the scenario, allowing the officers and their trainers to improve in self awareness and de-escalation skills. NeuroSmart was awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to launch a pilot program with law enforcement agencies around the country, as well as an Impact Grant from the Common Mission Project to fund prototype research and development.
Presentation
Melis Yilmaz Balban’s Hacking for Defense Experience
Melis was drawn to the Hacking for Defense course by the quality of previous projects she had seen on Steve Blank’s webpage, and the strong military teaching staff and connections the course provided. Team NeuroSmart is unique in that they came in with a problem they were already working on, looking to utilize the course to enter the defense space and find a problem sponsor.
Learning the H4D methodology greatly influenced the team’s thinking and problem solving. Melis highlighted this, saying “The H4D methodology made me think about partners, stakeholders, and beneficiaries, and understand how the value proposition for each beneficiary could be involved. It’s not enough to just build something for officers – you need to propose logistical things like cost models.”
Melis’s favorite part of the H4D course was meeting her teammates. She says of Emily: “She had a completely different background, but we were able to come together and work towards a goal in a high paced environment.”
Currently, Melis is continuing to build out the NeuroSmart startup, while Emily serves as a Vice President at DNS Capital on the direct investing team.