How We Started

Our team met in early 2012 at a Startup Weekend event in Lansing MI. We were inspired to build our own tDCS machine after a few weeks of reading about the technology, and struggling to find and easy and cheap way to try one for ourselves.

Our plan for the weekend was to build a working device for each of us, and have as much fun as possible doing it. In all honesty, we were not focused on the business side of the project much at all. We did throw together a quick website and signup form right before the SW pitches, and worked up a business model to run with. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t kill it in the pitches. In fact we failed pretty hard. We weren’t too stressed though, we had our devices and we had a lot of fun building them.

What we didn’t anticipate was the outpouring of interest we received from tech community. More and more people were signing up for our email list. ExtremeTech, Make, and Technology Review gave us some great coverage. The coolest thing though was the individuals who reached out to us, asking for more information and sharing their projects with us. You guys are awesome, and have inspired us to take this weekend project, and turn it into a larger experiment.

Our Goals

So here’s what we are trying to accomplish;

• We want to build and offer an awesome tDCS kit for body hackers, and home experimenters.
• We want to create a platform for sharing tDCS experiments with a community, and learning from each others experiences.
• We want to advance the technology and science of tDCS through large scale experimentation and data sharing.

It is important to note that we are not doctors, or trained neuroscientists. We are simply amateur scientists experimenting with tDCS, and how it affects personal performance. We feel that this is an important area of study, and our primary goal is to support motivated, intelligent experimenters in their efforts to safely test this technology.

tDCS has been around for decades in universities and hospitals around the world. However, most studies use their own self designed devices, resulting in data that is very hard to compare with other such studies.

We’d like to try a different approach. A standardized device, used by individual researchers. Amateur scientists who are willing to take the science forward faster than a few dozen disconnected researchers scattered around the globe.

We hope that our users will share their experiments and data, and help our community grow the understanding of tDCS as a whole.

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  Dr. Franz is not a real doctor, but you already knew that