Inclusive Brains

Disability is a fact of life that affects more than 1 billion individuals globally, 50 million of which suffer from quadriplegia preventing them from studying or working because of non inclusive educational and work environments. 

Inclusive Brains leverages artificial intelligence to create proprietary human-machine interfaces allowing individuals with severe sensorimotor impairment to study and work. Our solutions combine wearable neurophysiological sensors and algorithms empowering disabled individuals to control computers and workstations with mental and/or physiological commands.

True workplace inclusion requires tech that prevents digital and workplace exclusion of people suffering from severe cognitive and/or sensorimotor impairments. 

Inclusive Brains is creating a set of cost-effective and scalable (non-invasive) human-machine interfaces as a service specifically adapted to the needs of disabled individuals. Our solutions therefore provide true equity in the workplace by giving disabled individuals tools for them to find a job, perform and thrive in the work environment like anyone else.

According to the United Nations, the figures of unemployment amongst disabled people are staggering (80-90% in developing countries and between 50 and 70% in industrialized ones). Unemployment leads to social exclusion. Individuals suffering from conditions paralyzing their entire body from the neck down are not able to move a single limb. People with locked-in syndrome are not even able to talk. These two categories are the ones with the highest unemployment rate (near 100% globally).

Severely disabled people are therefore socially excluded and face a massive financial burden since they are not able to make a living and need to pay for expensive adapted equipment and help.

To date 127 countries have passed disability acts. Some require organizations to provide adapted workplaces and to employ disabled individuals. However, too many companies prefer to pay a fine instead of complying with laws supporting workplace inclusion. One of the reasons is the false beliefs that disabled employees decrease productivity and that their recruitment can turn into a reputational risk if a company needs to let them go. The direct consequence is an exclusion.

Inclusive Brains’ first solution is called SteephenX, a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) that allows paralyzed workers to control a computer or a workstation thanks to mental commands only. 

Wireless mobile brain sensors monitor electrical activity of the user’s brain. Our proprietary signal processing algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), processe brainwaves and translate them into mental commands in real time. It allows the user to control a connected object such as a computer, a robot or a vehicle. Our solutions also include cognitive, affective and sensorimotor monitoring for our AI to be trained, constantly improve and adapt to the needs, learning process and novel challenges faced by disabled workers who cannot move any limb or speak. 

SteephenX-enabled occupations include typing, sending messages or commands with brainwaves only. And for those individuals who lost the ability to speak, a unique text-to-speech solution offers a vocal digital twin mimicking the voice lost by the user, modulated by the emotions his/her brain experiences.

We have designed SteephenX to enable quadriplegic people, including those with locked-in syndrome, to mind-control a workstation, be productive at work and, ultimately, to significantly improve digital and workplace inclusion. 

In the world, 50+ million individuals are affected by neurodegenerative diseases or accidents that have damaged their spinal cord and hindered their ability to move. To date, there is no solution to fix the spinal cord. Being entirely paralyzed turns any task, including communicating with the world, into a massive challenge. Some disabled individuals who are not able to talk, only interact with the world thanks to eye-blinking Morse code.

We did work thoroughly with quadriplegic individuals, as well as their families and friends and interviewed dozens of heads of HR to tailor our offer and solutions to improve workplace inclusion. Being supported by the City of Paris’ unique “handitech” accelerator, Handic'Up Access, has opened doors to employment agencies, heads of HR, potential clients and fellow innovators working on tech to help disabled people. 

Sadly, many disabled individuals wrongly feel they are a burden to their loved ones and to a society that excludes them. SteephenX, is a solution that will allow disabled individuals to regain their dignity and access qualified digital jobs by enabling them to communicate and perform work, thanks to a mind-controlled workstation. 

We want to contribute to inclusion, one job at a time, and improve the sense of belonging and usefulness of disabled employees.

Social and economic inclusion together with our technological and social innovations are in line with the "digital inclusion" challenge. Because of the lack of digital and physical infrastructure and tools that would allow them to perform in the workplace, disabled people are excluded from society and the digital economy.

Our solutions aim at reducing digital, social and economic inequalities by providing disabled individuals with access to work. Inclusive Brains’ mission and products are aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals #10 “promoting social, economic and political inclusion for all including persons with disabilities”.

After developing two working prototypes: a brain computer interface to control digital and physical object and a speech-to-text app powered by a responsive vocal digital twin that adapts to the stress level measured in the brain, we are now entering into the beginning of the pilot phase, with the deployment in the coming months our first product, SteephenX, in 2 French administrations (including the municipalities of Paris and the Aix-Marseille Chamber of Commerce)

We kicked off our proof of concept phase thanks to the support of the City of Paris’ Handic’Up Access (HUA) Paris&Co incubator, the Ecole Polytechnique and HEC Business School. 

Thanks to this next deployment, we are able to go from prototyping to minimum viable product and to test the solution on 3 paralyzed people. We plan on deploying our next pilots in corporate environments as early as October 2021.

What makes our approach innovative is the transfer and productization of brain-computer interfaces (historically designed and used in scientific environments) to real life settings in order to improve workplace inclusion. We democratize what too many people still consider science fiction but that only happens to be science in action, to serve disabled workers and improve their access to a job. 

Our goal is to prove that people with some of the most severe disabilities, totally paralyzed and isolated from the world, can now interact with the world and join the workforce in a competitive way. This is a very strong inclusive signal, which will serve as a catalyst for other disabilities and will empower organizations to finally welcome quadriplegic works who therefore become a workforce strength. 

We believe that our solutions will allow other companies developng adaptive technologies for other disabilities - such as hearing, visual or brain disorders - to more easily be integrated in the work environment. 

We are on a mission to prove that the disabled workforce is an asset and an important market that investors should pay closer attention to.

Our solution is being deployed on three people, as part of our pilot with the Paris&Co incubator and the municipality of Paris, as part of the Handic'Up Access program. We will deploy a second corporate pilot starting next October.

Our objective with these two pilots is to show that our solution functions in a work environment and constitutes a viable business. We will then deploy the solution in five other organizations next January, in order to integrate twenty other people with disabilities, thanks to Inclusive Brains’ SteephenX. 

In one year, our goal is to have integrated about 100 people with disabilities into companies. In five years, we hope to have integrated thousands of people with disabilities.

In order to measure our projects on impact goals, we have already set up a measurement and evaluation framework with direct and indirect indicators.

1. Direct indicators

- Our first and most obvious indicator is the number of quadriplegic people hired thanks to our solution. We can measure this ourselves directly through our customers.

- Our second success indicator is the measure of wellness of disabled employees that we serve and their colleagues, as well as their productivity. 

2. Indirect indicators

Our goal is not only to be able to help quadriplegic people, but all people with disabilities. This is why, with the help of indicators provided by government services such as Pôle Emploi (The French Administration’s Labor Agency), we will measure the employment rate of people with disabilities. This measurement will allow us to know if our solution has a global impact on disability.

To understand how public policy works and to evaluate its effects on the citizens concerned, some governments (local or national) monitor social networks. This allows them to keep the finger on the pulse  of public opinion on a given topic or several of them. This is why we have also set up a social media monitoring system, which allows us to see what is being written about disability. 

2 full-time staff

3 part-time staff

Paul Barbaste (CEO) has just graduated his masters in business and engineering from HEC Paris and Polytechnique. He has already developed two brain-machine interface projects: Project JEDI (mind controlled drone) & Project TRON (mind controlled virtual reality game). 

Olivier Oullier, Phd (Chairman & Chief Science Officer) is a professor of behavioral and brain sciences, turned investor and serial entrepreneur. He was the President of EMOTIV, the world leader in wearable neurotechnology and a former Member of the Executive Committee and Global Head of Strategy in Health and Healthcare at the World Economic Forum (Davos).

They joined us:

Rodrigo Hübner Mendes is the Founder and the CEO of the Rodrigo Mendes Institute, a non-profit organization whose mission is to guarantee that every child with disability has access to quality education having helped 1.5 million of them to date. He became quadriplegic at 19, and mind-controlled a Formula 1 race car more than two decades later thanks to EMOTIV, the company Oullier was the President of. 

Estelle Fora Porthault leads our public and regulatory affairs and institutional communication. She’s in charge of our communication with the associations. She is the former director of Solidar'ISIT, an association in the social economy and is specialized in new technologies with impact.

Rodney O'connor, Phd, will run our technological innovation department. He is a professor of neurotechnologies and heads the bioelectronics lab at the Ecole des Mines de St Etienne (BEL). His experience spanning 30 years includes DARPA, Cambridge University and Bell Labs.

We want our team to represent the values we want to convey. We aim to have half of our team made up of disabled workers, which is why we have issued a call for applications during Inclusive Days in early June 2021.

Indeed, we wish that the next version of our product SteephenX could have been built by people who have to use it every day, in order to meet the needs of people with disabilities as well as possible. 

We believe that our brain-machine interfaces (BCIs) have the potential to change the lives of millions of socially isolated disabled individuals by including them in the workforce. It would be an honor for Inclusive Brains to be recognized as an MIT Solver and to be able to benefit from the exceptional support and network provided by the program. 

Should we be selected, we would thrive thanks to the experience of the partners and alumni (some of whom we have already started to exchange), in order to receive advice and constructive feedback, on our business model, scaling and growth roadmap and the integration of our solutions in the workforce. One of the founders (Oullier) was a judge of the inaugural MIT Solve challenge on brain health and we are therefore fully aware of the transformative power of becoming a Solver. It would elevate our social impact project to leverage BCIs to improve workplace digital inclusion into a different league, allowing us to gain more visibility from employers globally, to learn and to have more positive impact. 

We will use the prize money to hire a developer and a social scientist, to keep on improving our user and community experience. Finally, as we will enter our fundraising stage, we plan to join the Solve Innovation Future Investment Fund.

Everything Inclusive Brains has achieved so far has been self-funded. Our previous experience in brain computer interfaces (BCIs), including mind-controlling computers, wheelchairs, robots or vehicles has given us the technical confidence to build working prototypes. But our social impact project is not solely a tech journey, it involves the lives of vulnerable people and we wanted to make sure that we did not over promise and could deliver both on the tech and workplace integration fronts before coming out of stealth mode. 

After our bootstrapping phase, we plan on raising funds by the end of 2021. Inclusive Brains is not a charity business, our market studies over the past year have revealed a massive market. Working with Solve partners would allow us to challenge our business and social impact model, refine our pitching strategy as well as our funding and business targets to, hopefully be able to raise enough funds to scale our solution beyond France where our pilots and proofs of concepts are currently happening.

We would also like to benefit from the experience of Solve's partners in order to build a strong framework to monitor and evaluate the impact of our solution in the upcoming years. Moreover, being a solver will also allow us to benefit from technical and scientific advice from MIT and the Solve Global Challenge partners. 

We would like to have access to several types of partnerships: technological partnerships, experimentation and development partnerships. 

We hope becoming a Solver would allow us to interact with the MIT Media Lab, especially its Fluid Interfaces lab, which developed cutting-edge brain-machine interfaces. This would enable us to challenge and improve our technology with the experience of MIT and its science and technology partners, such as General Motors and Atlassian. 

We would also like to be involved with NGOs and foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the American Vodafone Foundation and the Patrick J McGovern Foundation. These foundations would provide us with visibility and mentorship to grow and experiment with new users who are part of their network. 

Amongst the Solvers, Sapien Lab would be of particular interest to us given their work on neurodiversity. Being able to collaborate with them would be key for our international growth and our ability for our brain-computer interfaces to be able to adapt to regional and cultural differences that impact brain development and functioning. 

APCO Worldwide’s leading effort on diversity and inclusion has been inspiring to us and we would be delighted to benefit from their data, experience and global footprint to tackle new markets.

We are interested in applying for the HP Digital Inclusion Award because we believe that HP, with its talents and values, could help us develop our product.

HP’s historical leadership in science and technology and its leadership on  inclusive design have been highly inspiring to us. HP’s mantra “More possibilities for those with disabilities” is fully aligned with Inclusive Brains mission. We are particularly inspired by HP’s work on diversity within the disability world. The organisation has been able to not only build on its pioneer technology but integrate it in a social impact framework. We could learn so much from their approach and without a doubt being able to collaborate with HP would take us to another R&D level but also in terms of social innovation and impact.

We want to apply to the AI for Humanity prize because we think that solutions powered by Inclusive Brains’ brain-machine interfaces benefit from artificial intelligence (AI), but can also contribute to improving AI by making it more inclusive as the data we work offers a level of diversity rarely included in algorithm (i.e. data from the brains and the bodies of disabled individuals). Our in-house scientific research, R&D and products are designed to be put at the service of humanity and digital inclusion. 

Furthermore, our research on brain-machine interfaces will allow us to better understand the diversity and plasticity of the human brains across the world, which is the basis for the development of new forms of artificial intelligence that would be more diverse and inclusive. Winning this challenge would also allow us to benefit from additional funding to develop our technology.