Ep. 70: Nextiles’ wearables collect valuable data for athletes Ankit Podcast

This transcription has been AI generated and therefore may have some inaccuracies.

Ep. 70: Nextiles’ wearables collect valuable data for athletes

This week’s guest on The WTiN Podcast is Dr George Sun, CEO, Nextiles.

Speaker 1: WTiN
Speaker 2: Dr George Sun

Speaker 1
Hello, my name is Jessica Owin, and I'm the Deputy digital editor at WTiN. And this is the WTiN podcast. Join me my guests every week as we talk about new and interesting innovations from across the textile and apparel industry. Whether it's talking to sustainable startups quizzing experts on the latest research and development, or chatting to companies about their most recent products, you can rest assured that the WTiN podcast will connect you with everything you need to know. This week, I am joined by Dr. George Sun, who is the CEO of the wearable smart textiles company called neck cells. George talks about the sensing capabilities of his materials, the data that is collected and how it can be valuable to groups like elite athletes than many other untapped applications, and much more.

Speaker 1
Hello, and welcome to the WTiN podcast George, how are you doing today?

Speaker 2
I'm doing good. I'm saying hello from Brooklyn. It's kind of early in the morning. But this is almost like my cup of coffee.

Speaker 1
Good cause, yeah, we can talk about your business, we can get you excited again, for what you do.

Speaker 2
I mean, that often happens with people, they're always like, this is a great chance to actually, you know, remind myself why I'm doing this. Maybe that'll be the case for you today.

Speaker 1
Well, I mean, thank you so much for joining me, because it's always great to talk about smart textiles as it is such an interesting and still emerging sector of the industry. And obviously, you've got your own company. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. So tell me a bit your a bit about your background, then first, why are you interested in smart textiles? Because I understand that you're actually trained more of more as a computer scientist and an electrical engineer. So I mean, how did you get into all this?

Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely more than happy to tell you almost the origin story of this company. This does go way back into my academic years. It started at UC Berkeley, I studied in electrical engineering and computer science and also majored in Biological Engineering. And my work in my research as an undergrad was was fascinating. I did a lot of theoretical work, a lot of materials work. People may get PTSD, but a lot of math and physics and study the books really, really hard. But after those four years at Berkeley, I decided I wanted more hands on experience with more hands on exposure. So I actually switched into biological engineering as my PhD. Emphasis when I went to MIT. So while at MIT, my work was very much on the bench side, I did a lot of chemistry, a lot of material science. And my goal was really to merge my theoretical background in the mathematics, the physics into something more practical, how do we get materials to interface and communicate with the human body. And that work, fortunately, was appreciated by the, by the scientific community by by my neighbouring community around Boston. And I was recruited to lead the engineering team at Puma since they had an innovation team that was spinning out. And that innovation team was really focused on instrumenting, the shoe, having the shoe become more of a actionable feature that someone can wear. So examples are, you know, can I track how many steps you're doing? Can I understand your gait, your posture, just from the shoe? And so my work was to take my theoretical knowledge of electronics and materials and make that more practical as in well, how do we embed that in a shoe given that the shoe is made out of XYZ components. And that work was extremely fascinating, because, you know, unlike a PhD, which, you know, if you're lucky, it might take a few decades for your work to come through fruition. This work while at Puma and through some research at MIT, as well, the The goal was to get this out in a few months to show a proof of concept. And that proof of concept was you know, put pressure sensors in the shoe put an accelerometer in the shoe, a GPS unit in the shoe, and especially put a battery and those Bluetooth mechanics in the shoe. And what was really exciting is that it worked at the end of the day, out of all my book, book expertise and you know, paperwork, when it came to making a physical product, I it was very rewarding to see that team bring about the work from the ideation stage to an actual, actual product. Long story short, out of almost that journey of you know, theoretical background to practical background. I decided there's a lot to do in the quote unquote wearable space because in the wearable space, a lot of consumers have been accustomed to, I would say the strap model, you know, strap it on the wrist, strap it on the ankle, you know, maybe around strapped around the chest, or even maybe your head as a as a sweatband that I thought, you know, when it really comes to where it pulls if you if you truly, truly want to be nerdy and just read the dictionary of what a wearable, is it something that you wear, it's a garment, it's a shirt, it's pants, it can even be underwear, no one really thinks about straps, as you know, the most essential wearable thing you have day to day. And so I thought, Well, can I do something to change that mindset? You know, can we build something that people can truly wear, as if it was a t shirt as if it was pants or a sleeve and so on. So that requires some different thinking, actually took a 180 thinking when I was at Puma and when I was at MIT, and that was well, can we rather instrument conventional technologies, which are accelerometers, can we rather instrument the fabric themselves? Right? Can we take the materials that we like and semiconductors and mechanical features that we like of fabrics and put those together and make fabrics the protagonist of the story? The garments, have them be the sensors that can monitor how we move and provide actionable feedback. So I know that it's really really broad, happy to go in more detail. But that was mainly mainly the the Genesis and impetus for really innovating on this technology, which is purely fabric based.

Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with you there if you want. If you want consumers to actually wear something that doesn't impact them, it's got to be basically a t shirt that you wouldn't even know has anything there. Like you just want to make it as simple as possible. So I mean, when did you actually, you know, start with next house, then when did you put the team together? Was it quite recently? 

Speaker 2
Yeah, it's, it's a long story I it's, it might be kind of a montage if I were to explain it. So it really started in, let's say, 2017 2018, were really the first motivation to incorporate the company was revolved around the was revolved around the IP. So the IP was something very special. That's that's what builds the foundation of most technology companies. And because of that, because I was innovating on IP that was independent of the work that I was doing at MIT and Puma that I decided to incorporate and to house this under the brand of next tiles, from 2018 to 2019, there was a lot of team building team searching. Now some team members were useful, some of them left during the, you know, for personal or for financial reasons. And so when we officially kick started the company, which was late 2019, we had a team, it was only, I think, three of us at that time, we had a we have a really, really good advisors, yet, we didn't really have a market to hit. It was like if we had we had a really good hammer. That's the analogy, we had a really good hammer. And we were just trying to find things to hit. Even if it looked like a nail, we were trying to hit it. And that's not how you build businesses. That's how you build research institutions. But that's not how you build businesses. And what was a really, you know, I don't want to highlight this because I know it's a devastating situation. But when COVID happened, that was actually very helpful for the company because it pumped the brakes. And it really made us think, what are we doing? And what's essential? Because when the pandemic struck, and we were quarantine, it almost made us realise Well, what were the essential features that make us as a company, and why do we deserve to survive? Because at this point, a lot of companies were startups that were either in tech or, you know, finance or whatever. It was mainly an existential crisis of, you know, what makes us deserving to kind of survive this pandemic, you know, what, do we still have customers during the pandemic? You know, what are our value propositions during the pandemic? Because at that point, you really had to shut off the fat. And in 2020, the team reorganised I gained to essential Yeah, I mean, they've been momentous. They've, they're, they're now friends for life. I'll call them out right now. John Peters, and Matt Evans, a business operator more, and Matt Evans is the financial operator, and also the operational operational manager really allowed me to kind of rethink how this company worked. And, and that meant going more b2b. So rather than hitting every kind of nail that we saw, which were quote, unquote, consumers and a fragmented market, we really had to think deep and say, what's our core technology? What's our core offering? And then how do we build a business around that and that that morphed our company more to business to business?

Speaker 1
That's really interesting. I know you guys sort of focus on sort of athletes and that kind of area. And I'll ask you a bit more about that later on. But before we do that, I think it'd be great for listeners to actually understand more about what you do. Because smart tech textiles when people say that, it can mean all sorts of things. It can literally be sewing like, I don't know, a battery pack to a T shirt, and it's suddenly a smart textile. But you guys, you know, you actually, as you say, you try and integrate this into the fabric itself. And I think you've got your own, like proprietary conductive fibres. So are you able to sort of perhaps even in layman's terms, explain what you do? Exactly?

Speaker 2
Absolutely, absolutely. The core of the biggest takeaway is that we actually are a materials company. And what that means is that we take the materials from the soft good world, soft goods being nylon, polyester, spandex, you know, what have you. And we take the materials from the semiconductor world, those things are like copper, silver, you know, aluminium carbon, you name that as well. And we look at that, and we try to envision a Venn diagram, and that Venn diagram is what do we like, of either side. So for soft goods, it's actually in the name, it's soft, it's comfortable, it breathes with you, it flexes with the can make different sizes of fabrics. And we love that. All right, we've been using fabrics for millennia. Whereas for the semiconductors, the things that we like are its intelligence are, you know, you can make semiconductors that can store memory, you have sensors that you can build from these materials and from these chemicals. But the things we don't like about semiconductors is that they're bulky, they're rigid, they don't breathe with you. They're more like a ball and chain if you do have them strapped onto your body. So at the core, we build both conductive fabrics and semi conductive fabrics. And the reason why I want to make that distinction is that in the current market, everyone is raving about conductive fabrics, which is a great industry, a great technology. But a conductive fabric is exactly what you just said, it just conducts something from point A to point B. So yes, you could hook up a battery to a conductive fibre. And that fibre you could sew it into somewhere else on the body. And all it does is take that signal from the battery, and maybe power an LED sewn somewhere else. And so there's a lot of these technologies that show you know, these beautiful LEDs, these colours, you know, basic stitching of sensors, two sensors. But if you really look at it, the quote unquote protagonists of of this story is that it's still the battery and that led that are doing the heavy lifting in this kind of smart textiles and that boundary and that led that's well, that's still a hard thing, that's still us. That's still hardware. And like technology, it's just so happens to be connected by a very conductive fabric. We still use conductive fabrics, but the differentiations that we also build semiconductor fabrics. And so semiconductor fabrics are fabrics that have sensing capabilities. What that means is that we're able to sew semiconductor fabrics in a pattern such that as you stretch the fabric, as you bend the fabric, as you push pressure on the fabric, we can actually sense that kind of deformation. Maybe in other words, is that if we were to sew, maybe a mesh on the elbow, for example. And this elbow region had our semi conductive fabrics, as this elbow is bending, obviously, that fabric has to bend with the elbow, it has to kind of push away or bend as you move that elbow. And as this fabric bends and stretches the spacing, literally the mechanical spacing between the fabrics expand the expand the contract, there's more tension. And because of that, we can actually measure that through small voltage changes, small current changes. And that's when this semiconductor fabric becomes the protagonist. This is actually the thing that's doing the job, right, there's no battery involved. There's no external LED or other circuit like device, what's doing the job is the fabric itself. So again, when these fabrics are mechanically morphed, or when they're mechanically changed. And that's because the, you know, there's more holes, there's more gaps there, they're expanding a bit. We can sense all of that through electrical means. And once we have that, just because given our research and this for the past several years, we can calibrate that a map that really, really well to what's happening on the body. So let's say for example, for your elbow, it's stretching, right, you're bending your elbow, that area that we've sewn in is stretching with the elbow bend and we see a signal we see oh, you know, your your your voltage or your current increased by 50%. And now the question on the data science team that we have is, well, how do you even get a change of 50% of voltage on that fabric? And we do very basic physics. of correlating that 50% change to saying, Yeah, you moved to get that 50% change required a bending strength of 90 degrees, right? And then afterwards, we can do things like, oh, you know, we see a single change of 25%. You know, what does that mean? That would mean, okay, you've bent your arm at 45 degrees. And if you take very quick snapshots as a function of time, let's say we're measuring every millisecond, even every 100 microseconds, which is very quick, we can then tell you, Okay, after a betting cycle that we've captured over a span of one second, we can tell you, Okay, you move your arm from zero to 80 degrees within this one second. And once we have a timestamp on any of this, we can then calculate your your angular acceleration, your angular velocity, and from all these numbers, so again, it comes back to the physics we can do crazy mathematical analyses to say, Okay, this is your torque, right? This has the power you exerted on that elbow. And then we are giving these to, you know, athletes or people who, who really desire these numbers. And so I do remember that there are a lot of people who came up to me, and the first question is, you know, why, why should I care? You know, why do I care about my elbow? You know, why should I care about these? You know, very fundamental measurements, like torque and strain and power? And the really the answer is, it's, it depends on whether you want it or not, right? I feel like there's a lot of people out there who are happy with the pedometer, right? We are happy with that magical 10,000 steps, if that's the thought floats your boat, and that that's what makes you get out the door and walk 10,000 steps, I would say keep the pedometer, there's no, there's really no reason to substitute that. But for people who really desire, you know, I need to understand the technique of my throat, because I'm at that highest level of sports, or, you know, I'm a physician, or I'm a physical therapist, and there's people who have injuries, or chronic joint injuries that need to know, well, is that exertion of power recommended for the elbow, given that you may have had an injury or you have arthritis, or maybe you're you're of age, and you're having difficulty moving? Well, those kind of numbers are very, very helpful. And if you can get a snapshot as a function of time, days, months, it becomes very, very informative.

Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. And I mean, I understand that you've also managed to sort of, because obviously, what you've spoken about is quite complex into an athlete who's got no scientific background, that all that information will mean nothing to them. And so you guys have also, I think, developed an app that obviously must take this data and translate it into an easy to understand measurable format, is that right?

Speaker 2
Yeah, that's, that's right. And, and it's, and there's a little bit more to it. So we do also have a data science team, that that we haven't, it's actually a pretty robust team that we're growing at the moment. And that is, it has two functions in terms that data science team, it's one of them, is to really find ways to interpret this new type of data. I don't want to sound too overconfident, and I don't want to come across as extremely arrogant, but the data we're capturing is new, not a lot of people have seen this in the wild, right? People have ideated, about, you know, flexible fabric, string gauges, and all these crazy fabric sensors. But we're the ones to really, truly first implement this in, you know, in the wild, where people are doing, you know, using our sleeves using our clothing, for football, baseball, they're doing this in their training, that the data we're getting is extremely new, it's almost like, you know, just discovering a new element, or discovering a new solar system is like, you know, what does, what does this really really mean to us? So we have data scientists who are kind of doing that example I did before, it's like, you know, what does 50% Drop mean? Does that mean 90 degrees? Does that mean 45 degree bend? Does that mean, you know, 20 watts of power? Does that mean, you know, certain number of of Newton's of force. So we do offer very fundamental metrics, like this is just your raw data. And here's the raw data that for you, you could do some higher level interpretations to say, Okay, well, this is what my step count was, for example, or this is how many times I bet my elbow during the day. So we do offer algorithms that kind of translate our fabric data into physical data. After that we do also offer and we try and do that, and in collaboration with our athletes, is this machine learning? Because as you just said, yeah, it's great to know my power, my Newton's of force and so on, so forth, but it almost becomes inundating it's almost it becomes overwhelming, you know, what do I do with, you know, gigabytes of data? And that's where we're working with our athletes to machine learn and say we don't, what's it's almost like pattern matching, to say, given that we're seeing these trends in your data, this profiler data, it's pattern matching, and it's you can almost see it's almost like fingerprinting to say, Hey, this is your data. And this is how it looks when you do XYZ, this is how it looks when you're fatigued. This is how it looks when you're at your peak. This is how it looks when you've thrown 100 pitches, and now you're maybe deteriorating, and maybe you're exerting power where it shouldn't be going. And that's where it becomes really, really useful with the athletes. The one thing I do want to add to that point you just raised is that conception that athletes don't really know what they're doing. And I had that bias as well, when I started to say, oh, you know, I have a PhD, you know, I know what I'm doing. Obviously, I don't actually, I don't know how to throw a baseball that fast. I don't think I even know how to throw football. So it really comes to our athletes to educate us to understand what do they want from their, from their data. And I have been continuously impressed how intelligent athletes are, when it comes to understanding their body, and having an intuition and even almost a mathematical intuition to understanding what data they need to improve their game. So for example, we have a baseball player who is extremely knowledgeable about pitching and the kinematic chain of throwing the throwing force from their arm to their torso to their knee, the thing that they don't have is the right data to match that to their hypotheses. Because right now, if you want to do this in the field, you have to do camera vision. And that's expensive, right? You have to go to like a secure facility, you know, no stray lighting, and you probably have 12 cameras looking at you. Or you have to wear like 12 balls or 16 accelerometers like you'll do for CGI. And and that's really not, that doesn't really, really recapitulate what what they do in the wild. So what we want to do with these athletes is say, Just wear our compression clothing, whether that's a compression knee brace to pants to assure or asleep. And Allah does provide you the data and you tell us what you want from it. And these collaborations have been extremely fruitful.

Speaker 1
Wow, that's so interesting, actually. Because, well, obviously, being a journalist in this sector, we write and we come across smart textile companies, and a lot of people are either really excited about the future. And they think, oh, yeah, smart Textiles is going to dominate everything we do. Or other people are very sceptical, and they think, no, it's a fad. It's something that's quite cool. But it's going to wear off after time, people will just drop, the excitement will wear off. But so from what I understand, from what you've said, today, it sounds like smart textiles will definitely have a place in the future. But then you need to work with the people such as the athletes and for your instance, to understand why it will be valuable to them. It needs to be something that's going to enhance their performance enhance their life. And that's the only way the sort of smart textiles will ever be adopted. I mean, is that what you're getting at? 

Speaker 2
Absolutely, not that you hit the nail on the head. And it's, I can agree. If you don't do smart textiles, if you don't do wearables, right? It becomes gimmicky. And I do not, like I have nowhere or no one to really point out. I'm not gonna have a good example. But I just believe that for the past two decades, when wearables were coming out, that there was this huge motivation to use it. You know, we have those pedometers. We have the step count analysis. But somewhere along the lines, I think people found it was a little bit too gimmicky. And I think we have jokes of like putting a pedometer on a dog and faking that we step you know, we ran, you know, 10,000 miles that day, you know, there's always sort of strokes of cheating the system. And so, yeah, it does come down to the value to the consumer and the value to the athletes. It just turns out right now, the biggest value we have are for athletes, because they they've been the one that has been the most siloed. And then again, I'm learning more and more when I'm in this industry. You know, you always think athletes have those Jacuzzis or those limousines. But when it comes to, you know, understanding their body and analysis, they're quite quite deprived, actually. Right. It's actually the consumers that have the most amount of tech, you know, we have the, you know, the Alexa's at our homes we have, we have even our phones are talking back to us now. Whereas for the athletic market, it's still coaches, it's still paper and pen. It's still watching videos of how you how you did your sport and repeating that video over and over again. That not to say it's an esoteric field, but it's, it's it's a field that requires specific innovation for those specific users. And really, to answer your question, and I don't mean to sound, you know, extremely philosophical or, or be cliche, but it's almost like when, when the car came out, you know, when Ford realised, hey, you know, I can put four wheels on a vehicle and maybe I can go faster with this corner coffee, vehicular, you know, instrument and But from what I heard when I was reading his biography and read some of those piece, his papers, he actually was a really great inventor that he asked questions he asked the public, you know, what do you want in terms of transportation? And his? And the answer that he would routinely get would be like, I want a faster horse, right? I want a faster horse, I want a horse that doesn't get sick. I want a horse that doesn't eat too much. And I want a horse that just like gets me from point A to point B. And then for you know, Ford, he would always kind of wonder like, what do you want a car. And many of these people were like, you know, what's a car I don't need that looks weird. And I'm happy with my horse, I just want a horse that just doesn't get sick. And we're in that dilemma as well of like, we still don't know the application, but we kind of had that strong belief that it could change. perceptions, right? It same thing for the phone, right? The phone and the camera, I think there's jokes of like, why would I have a camera on my phone, right? I'll just buy a camera, and I'll just buy a different phone. But putting that camera on the phone changed, actually, it changed the generation, right? Of using Tiktok, and Instagram, and so on. So we have a strong belief that there there's something there for smart textiles. And the thing I want to say too, as a takeaway is that it it's complimentary. It's not a conquering technology, it shouldn't be, it's not something that should replace an existing technology. It's it's complimentary, right, you'll still have your phones, you'll still have your your self driving cars in the future. But you'll also have an additional, you know, technology in your utility belt. And that was should, and it will be in your clothing.

Speaker 1
Right? And I mean, you're obviously focusing on athletes, and I think that's a really easy way of understanding how smart textiles can be a value. But do you think there are any other gaps in the market that could be explored that there I mean, off the top of my head, I'm thinking maybe medicine and you know, tracking your, you know, heart rate, and so on, I think there are people in the space doing that. But are there any other more any other markets that you think was really see the value in this? 

Speaker 2
Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. Because that segues into some of the stories of how this company tried going into business. And we first started in the physical therapy space. My sister's a physical therapist, I was surrounded by doctors growing up, I went to an institution that was surrounded by, you know, many phenomenal doctors and institutions that I thought, you know, obviously, obviously, they would want this kind of that hammer and nail analogy, like, obviously, they like the shiny toy, I'm gonna give it a doctor's, I'm going to give to a physical therapist, I thought they would love it, they would love the idea of, you know, remote monitoring, compliance tracking, did someone do the exercises after their rehab? And it turned out that this market, obviously requires a lot of convincing, you don't put something on a human body without a lot of trials first. Right? And so there's always this catch 22 of how do you prove to them that that works? Before you have to do like a $10 million experiment, right. And not to say people were vehemently like rejecting what we were doing, but it was it was scepticism, I think that scepticism exists more so in the medical world than the consumer world, right. And when it comes to the medical world, it has to be peer who do not want to hurt anyone. So even though I had strong convictions that I can do gait analysis, I can help people and rehab people of how they could, you know, regain their walking stuff. So I thought that was, you know, would be incredibly impactful. And it is it's an extremely impactful application. But it just required a lot of work and a require a lot of discussions because just how in the US and per se, the healthcare market, it's quite fragmented. There's there's not a lot of consolidated point people that you that you can talk to, to gain widespread acceptance, right. I mean, the there's, there's no such thing as a medical influencer. And if I, if anyone knows when I would love to talk with them, so then it comes to the other side of will, what consumers want is want this right, if it's not medicine, can consumers themselves just adopt the tech that they think and make their lives healthier? And that was even more so of a difficulty that was more of a lot of convincing? That's where you do have to talk to influencers, get a champion for you and go through that market. And maybe from this conversation, you probably already know, I'm not a marketing person. I don't give crazy or funny slogans or taglines, it's, it was really hard to go to the consumer world. So for athletes, it was just that that Goldilocks of there was enough of them to make a business and there's enough of them that demanded that high calibre technology and also the data and then Going back to your question, because we have kind of morphed to this b2b, we're working with sporting facilities, we're working with training camps. We're working with coaches that, you know, disseminate our technology to their athletes, because we're b2b, we're realising there's a lot of other businesses that also have been left behind in this, you know, startup silicon revolution. There's still companies that use sewing technology. And that's the I think the the beauty of what we do is that we're trying to revitalise a technology that was at the forefront of technology to almost 2000 years ago, that was the thing, three dozen years ago, sewing was the thing, right? And now it's somewhat been relegated to oh, you know, we'll just do it in an offshore country. You know, it's a simple tech, well, just, it's cheap labour. And my argument is, it's not it is, it's not supposed to be a cheap labour, it is extremely technical challenge. And I would argue to anyone who says it's not a technical challenge. So me a button, like if someone can show me a button, I would say, Okay, fine, you prove me wrong. But even for that simple task, it's hard. It takes very custom machines to sew buttons to sew zippers to make your jeans. And that said, there's a lot of OEMs out there that actually want to get smarter that wants to innovate. So like betting companies, carpet companies, turf companies, companies that make many standard human appliances, like chairs, to car seats, to carpets, to dads to pillows, we see an opportunity in that market as well to now have these sensors have this understanding of movement on these quote unquote, static devices, you know, can I understand your ergonomic posture? When you're sitting on a chair, right? Are you in the best posture available, when you are, you know, sitting in the car, because we also realise with talking to a few OEMs in the car manufacturing space, your posture is extremely indicative to how well you drive, right, you don't want to be on your phone and have your head tilted or falling asleep while you're on the wheel. And yes, you can use cameras to kind of track that. But it's much more passive, it's, it's a lot more anonymous, if you kind of do that through the fabric and the seating. So not to be too funny. But like just measuring where your blood is on the car seat, that's actually very useful. Do this for the bed to see, you know, are you in the most comfortable position. And with that kind of data, can you actually move the bed in a way that helps the person sleep better. And this is also very useful for betting companies that are in the medical space as well, because there's a lot of patients out there that if you have them in the bed for too long, they atrophy, you want to turn people in the beds every two hours, because you want, you know, those who are rehabilitating or those who can't move on their own, you want them to move in that bed. And so to monitor that virtually is very, would be very practical for someone rather than having a stopwatch. So we do see a lot of potential in this b2b Or this OEM market. And I know I just said I'm not a marketing person. But the slogan that we say is powered by next tiles, we were more than happy to be behind the scenes. We're more than happy to power an existing platform, because we just want to see this revolution happen. So if it so happens that, you know, Company X doles out their carpets or doles out there betting with our technology, but it's their product? That's a win for us. And we would like to see it that way. 

Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. Well, it seems like the world could be powered by next towers by what you've just sort of rattled off as a list there of things you could explore. Now, another question that I wanted to ask you, is something I've only actually been considering over the last few months. And that's how do you ensure that the data you collect is secure and safe? I mean, I think in the UK, we've now got like GDPR, and things like that. And even though a lot of this data is just heart rate, or it might be you know, the swing of your elbow and baseball, I mean, someone might think, Well, what does anyone want to do with that, but I'm sure there are people out there that might want this data. So how do you keep that all safe and secure?

Speaker 2
I love that question. Because it's been part part of our team's mission from the start of how do we make either data anonymous or secure, or private for that individual? And not to give you a boring answer, but actually requires working with the right lawyers, right right now, not not to say, Okay, there's only one answer for this. But for us, it's really just to learn the legal landscape and the ethical landscape of how this works. And we're getting consultants, we're getting lawyers to really talk us through this. And the one thing is, I don't want to sound like you know, we're just throwing lawyers at this to kind of put this away. We're actually highly involved with trying to understand, you know, what's the best way to secure this type of data? Because, yes, heart rate has been out there for a while. accelerometer data has been out there for a while but when it comes to our data which are more minut, things like forces and power and strain, it does fall under the umbrella of mechanical data. But it's new enough that we do want to be sensitive to how it could be abused, quote, unquote, right? Because for anyone who deals with data, it's all as always happy go lucky until it gets abused. So we are working with the right people and consultants to understand legally what's what's the parameters that we can work under? And ethically, you know, what should we do? I can say, right now, we don't have an answer. And I could save for most data companies, I think we all don't have the right answer. But we're all trying to seek it. And it's, it's just more about being proactive, and we are trying to be very proactive. The things that we're doing behind the scenes is that our data is encrypted. I mean, that's the simplest thing that we can do is held on our servers. So it's next house servers. So we actually get to manage where their servers are located, and how much data is coming in and coming out. We do try our best. And we actually do scrape any kind of names from our databases when we do any kind of interpretations. I don't know if there's too much to explain. But we do build algorithms, we do build training models out of our data so that we can improve our our offerings to say, Okay, well, this is cleaner data, this is how you better interpret the data. But that has to come from somewhere, right? That has to come from people who have used the product and who have stored the data on our servers. But whenever that happens, we always remove their names. And it's because we never want to have a data set that specifically highlights a demographic, right, we don't want to have datasets that only it's this data came from this person or that that's why this algorithm works. That's not what we want to do. So we do a lot of blind studies, we try to anonymize everything that we do. But at the end of the day, it's a learning process. And for us, it's something that we're proactively pursuing.

Speaker 1
Right? Yeah, that's really interesting, actually, because I think anyone listening who might be involved in this smart textile space, I think it is a subject that could be easily overlooked. And as you say, it's all happy go lucky until someone abuses it. So it's good to just, you know, hear what other companies approach is to say, thank you. Now, unfortunately, we're sort of running out of time. But I mean, the last question, then, I mean, I understand that you completed a seed round last year. So what are the next steps for your company, then? I mean, where are you at in your journey? And what obstacles still need to be overcome? 

Speaker 2
Yes, right now is that we have enough fuel in our engine to launch products. Right? At this point, we are hoping to launch products during the summer to our athletes. These are compression sleeves, compression knee braces, we're also doling out socks and mats. So there's going to be a portfolio of products that we're going to give out. And we call them flagship products, as in, they're just examples to demonstrate the offerings you can have. And so with these products, whether you want to put this on your elbow for for throwing, or on your knee for monitoring leg days, or your sock, or these kind of mats, or hold, pulling out, is that they're mainly just to elicit ideation for people who use them. So if someone wants to come up to us and say, hey, I want to, I want to, I want parents that combines flagship product one and two, you know, we can do that for them as well. So the products we're kind of doling out are more of examples to highlight, this is the things that we're doing, please go use them, please use your algorithms, please see your own data. And let's innovate together. And with we do have I set on raising a formal Series A, we do have great investors that came in, in the seed round. And, you know, it's our responsibility to grow collectively as a company. So we do have a mission to raise a Series A but before that, we need to do our homework. And that homework is released product. You know, make sure the dog eats the dog food, make sure that people like it, we're not just you know, claiming that people like it and and with that, we want to innovate alongside our partners. So even if they say, Hey, this doesn't work, we don't like it, the fabric is feels weird. We have full capacity in the company to change and to pivot. That's, that's really, the, if I can leave leave this conversation with with with any kind of mention is that we have a phenomenal team. And our phenomenal team is always on their toes. And we're always there to change and innovate. And I'm very confident that even if we release products and the first 100 You know, feedback are negative to say I just it doesn't work or something XYZ happened. No, we will be there to change it. And that can only improve our product. 

Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. That's such a healthy approach. I think especially you know, in COVID-19 There are so many of these traditionally run businesses that going under unfortunately, and flexibility and agility are just so important. I am in whatever area of the industry you're in, so, I mean, it sounds like you've got a lot to look forward to there.

Speaker 2
No, thank you so much. I actually really think thanks for the support and letting me almost have this cathartic discussion with you.

Speaker 1
Well, I mean, it's been a pleasure to talk to you, George. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast and I can't wait to see these flagship products that you'll be releasing soon. Awesome.

Speaker 2
I look forward to thank you so much.