Innovator: Stephen Lake's Muscle-Reading Remote Control

Over microbrews last April at a pub near Ontario’s University of Waterloo, engineering student Stephen Lake, 23, and two friends discussed using wearable devices to improve motion-sensitive computer interfaces. Nintendo’s wireless Wii remote offers ways to play using hand gestures, but like similar gadgets requires stationary sensors and loses accuracy beyond a certain range. For more freedom of movement, Lake wondered, why not track users’ electrical impulses, wherever they’re standing?

His 15-employee startup, Thalmic Labs, has since developed a plastic armband called Myo (Greek for “muscle”) that allows wearers to control electronic devices with gestures without holding a gadget. The band detects electrical impulses traveling from the brain to hand and arm muscles. Software translates these signals in a way that a PC, tablet, or remote-controlled helicopter can interpret. (Thalmic is awaiting patent approvals.) “We already use our hands for everything,” Lake says, after demonstrating how Myo can replace a keyboard and mouse in the classic PC shooter game Counter-Strike. Lewis Ward, a video game analyst for market researcher IDC, says upgrading player interfaces is “an important direction of innovation for gaming as a whole.”