(00:07)Hi and welcome to another episode of Humans Aren’t Robots brought to you by Digital Noir. I’m your host, Sam Davies, and we’re throwing back to another chat I had at SouthStart earlier in the year. There really were some incredible people that we’re talking to and none more so than Alex Moss who we’ve got today. Alex has such an eclectic background. She started off in London working in the fashion and art worlds and then pivoted literally into space.
But let’s start there like, what did you do before you’re running Canaria? Where did you start?
(01:43)Okay, So before I was in Canaria, I had run two companies in London. I had founded a fashion magazine and then went on to found an art dealership called Court, which was a mixture between an avant guard curation company on an art dealership specialising in up incoming contemporary artists in London.
(02:36)I was always interested in the sciences. Did a bit of coding when I was about 12. It was only after I got back into technology again and I felt that with the growing knowledge I’d had about the psychology of design, and I was really interested in architecture on how architecture changes human behaviour based on a lot of studies in abattoirs about how if you made a sharp wall into a carved wall, it would find lower cortisol levels and cattle. So if that’s the effect it has on cattle, imagine the effect that architecture has on the human being. That was the tangent for how I slowly got into tech. I had the worst day at work ever for an art dealer in Sloane Square and depending on who you ask, I quit on the spot slash got fired and it was not pretty. And I pieced out very hard at that point and I left London and gave up the art world. I went to stay in a garage with two friends of mine in Great Yarmouth and to work out what the hell I was going to do next with my career because I wasn’t happy in the art world.
I wanted to do something that was more hands-on that was producing objects that had more of a significant meaning and impact on the everyday life of users. And I spent about nine months in gestation in a garage, and I worked out during that period that I didn’t want to be an art dealer. I wanted to be a medical device designer, so I taught myself fusion 3 60. I was reading about medical device engineering. I just spent 9 months training myself up. Really,
(06:11)So did you study art or history or what?
(06:16)I studied art history at the Courtauld Institute in London. So I had a very, very, very academic background and training. I’d always been working at the same time.
(07:23)Okay, saying you grew up in London?
(07:28)Yeah. Born and bred Londoner, lived everywhere and did get into the habit of moving about twice a year in London whilst I was there. Always spent, what, 20 or 23 years in London. You were saying background history, a very academic, very formal court old. I’d always been a writer on the side from the age of about 16 onwards. I really got to explore with the digital editor at the time, Isabelle Jacobs, I’m still great friends with. She was really into space travel. We worked together for years, and she was really one of the figures that was very key within that slow transition that happened over a few years. There’s such a strong relationship between science fiction and science, and there’s such a strong relation between art and science.
(08:57)And so in that garage, where was that pivot point that was just sort of gelling in your mind? I talked before about how it’s interesting where these disparate things in your life that you may not realise they’re going to become a massive impact later in life. And then all of a sudden, something comes up and you’re like this makes sense
(09:14)And it all comes together. It feels like that with a lot of random life experiences. I mean, one could definitely describe myself as unemployable just before I found random knowledge of various aspects. And it was something that really came together in the moment at the NASA hackathon in 2016, that really kick started my career.
(09:55)How did you hear about that? Why were you there?
(09:57)Ah, it was relatively random, I had a friend of mine he’d just moved from finance to tech, who said, if you’re serious about this, you have to start going to Hackathons, and you have stop putting yourself out there and you have to start just doing something with the new skills that you’ve been gathering in the garage. But that was my first hackathon, I didn’t know at the time how significant it was. It was a big deal internationally. It was, in retrospect, definitely helped me. But I did see that it was NASA like what can I create in the space of three days? So I was looking at the briefs that NASA put out that year. They had things like the new rocket propulsion system, and I was like absolutely not.
But there were wearables which okay, wearables that I can do. It’s very basic electronics engineering. They had an issue for carbon dioxide aboard the international space station, they had no way to monitor it. So my initial concept was very easy well, let’s do an air based CO2 monitor to detect carbon dioxide aboard the international space station. It was one of those days where everything comes together at the right moment. Once I got there as well, because I was really adamant that it should be based around the air and suddenly, the whole nine months of being in that garage and the years in the art world snapped into place, because I realised no one had bothered to put something on the earlobe. And the earlobe pulse oximetry device for vital signs monitoring is the most accurate place to get readings from. Then I ended up working at this hackathon which was so much more than the carbon dioxide monitor. It became a dual carbon dioxide monitor and vital signs monitor for astronauts, but that also had predicted capabilities.
And that’s basically how we’ve continued building and specialising since then. But anyway, the moment all came together was the base in the air.
(13:18)So what was the spark for that? How did you find that out?
(13:19)Because I was in the fashion and art world during the time and working with Isabel, actually, that I wore a lot of Alexander McQueen earcuffs and I hated wearing earrings because they were very uncomfortable. But if I were one of these huge earcuffs, they were very avant garde, they were weighty, but they were so comfortable to wear that I could wear them for two weeks at a time and not have to take them off if I didn’t want to. And then suddenly, well, I’d been reading a lot of neurology over that period of time and it suddenly clicked into place like all the reason I didn’t feel that was because there are very few nerve endings around the cornice of the earlobe and Alexander McQueen had accidentally invented the best form factor to gather medical grade, vital signs data from the human body. And he hadn’t realised it. So that was when it came full circle. I was like, there’s something that we really need to look into very seriously here, because this just hasn’t been done before.
(14:27)And so in those three days of the hackathon, was it three days? What did you walk out there with? Did you actually have software in place? Was there a prototype?
(14:36)We had full PCBs. We had schematics for PCBs. We had a three d printable prototype. We also had an awareness of what the infrastructure, so the systems engineering term was going to look like roughly. We knew vaguely how the jigsaw puzzle pieces would need to fit together for something like this to work. But we also came away with realising how significant it was for other sectors and mining was already there from the very beginning. And it was oh my God, we realised that we could have built something and designed something that could be used for things like epileptic fit prediction, but really predicting it 10 minutes before someone was going to have that.
(15:16)So was the name Canaria? Did you have that before you?
(15:22)Yeah it was that weekend of the hackathon.
(15:29)Yes, the early warning system like the first port of call for knowing that a hazardous incident is about to take place was the Canaria.
(15:38)Were you excited? You didn’t even know what you’d created?
(15:43)I was just too tired. It was only on the final day it was like, what you’ve done is like really amazing. Then there was one of the organised one, oh, yes you’ve got a pitch to the NASA panel in an hour Alex. And I was like, What do you mean I have to pitch to the NASA panel in an hour? Because I wasn’t thinking about it. It just seemed like this is what I’ve made and this is what it does. And we won a national award like a few minutes later.
It was such a radical transition as well that I remember we got a wave of media attention as well. It was in 2016 a wave of media attention. I literally just won an award from NASA.
(17:11) My co-founders and I started up the company immediately afterwards. Established that we had the rights to our own invention, which is important to do. Filed a patent. Yeah, and then another week off that we won the NASA global best support work 2016
That was in the space of, like, really my life changed in like two weeks. It’s incredible. It was crazy.
(17:31)The first one was in the UK the Hackathon?
(17:34) Yeah, National Award in the UK, and then it was the Global award immediately after.
(17:38)And so did you have co-founders prior to that, or is that just you?
(17:43)No, we met then. Dr Robert Fignon, who’s still a cofounder of the company, is the chief technical officer of Canaria Technologies. He was the best chief technical officer, co-founder that you could ever hope for.
(18:25)And so he was there at the nationals and saw that and was like, I’m on board, this is amazing.
(18:29)Even before the nationals. So he was like, the second I pitched on stage, which was this earpiece based vital monitor, but I was pitching for carbon dioxide. I almost got laughed off stage by the audience. But Rob came up to me afterwards, and he said I think you’ve got something to this, because he was getting more into medical device engineering himself. And he said did you know that we could actually do vital signs at the same time as what you’ve proposed for carbon dioxide monitoring? And I said no I didn’t, but that sounds really interesting. Let’s build upon this. We’ve been running for 3.5 years as a company now.
(19:07)And so what’s that journey been like? Like what has happened since then?
(19:12)Well, so much, moving to Australia was a big thing.
Well, it’s been such a wild journey. It happened very, very quickly.
(20:05)We remain, one of the first generations off predictive biometrics company, combining miniature medical hardware with the official intelligence predicting serious medical events, but before they happen. It’s very broad, and it ended up being that mining looked like it was going to be our first market, especially because designing for manned space exploration was so echoed by the requirements of building for underground mining. Because you’re still dealing with really severe communications issues and you’re dealing with extreme environments.
(21:05)Okay, what are intrinsically safe standards? It was just two years ago and when we looked into it like this is much easier than building for man space exploration. We’re actually not gonna have a problem with this, which was a good boost of confidence, I suppose.
(21:45)Introduced to Bill Tai who said if you’re serious about mining, then you have to go talk to this group called On Earth because they are the world’s eminent mining investment group and accelerator programme. The only group that you should be working with to actually get this to market. So we contacted them immediately. I don’t think On Earth will mind too much and me saying that they basically told us to fuck off when we first contacted them. Then it took us eight months of just validating that what we wanted to build was possible, gaining a bit more traction in the UK and then eventually after we got another wave of press nine months later because of a pitch at Innovate UK event that they ended up contacting us and going, you know, actually, we are interested in this. You’ve clearly made progress and when are you available for a call? Eventually it turned out this culminated in an investment offer into the company for us to move to Australia. But the ultimatum was you have to be here in 10 days and if you are willing to relocate from London to Brisbane we will invest in you. And we moved and we’ve been based in Brisbane ever since.
(23:11)How has that transition been for you?
(23:14) Amazingly, I love Brisbane.
(25:44) Designing for space I suppose it’s definity harder than for mining. The plus side, there are only ever six people in space at any one time aboard the international space station. So you get all of them to wear one of your devices, and you get to say we have a 100% market share of the space market.
(26:10)This space aspect definitely works from a PR angle, but it’s better than mining. Like I wrote down here, I think you actually said it: You taught yourself a new skill set and punted to NASA, that’s a good kind of easy one liner
(26:20)I couldn’t have ended up in the resources sector without having gone through that NASA initiative, like it just wouldn’t have crossed my mind that that was even a relevant industry.
(26:47)You mentioned that you thought the Australian ecosystem was 20 years behind New York, London and Silicon Valley?
(27:02)With Brexit it is now only 10 years, 100% productivity for Australian VC companies.
(27:24)Yes that I agree with. It’s learning faster and as an example of this, as of 2018 in the U. S. only 2% of technology founders were women. By comparison, though, in Australia 12% of founders are women. So there is very much an avenue for Australia making a faster jump to a new level. It’s not going to take Australia 20 years to catch up.
(27:56)Are there cultural differences? So as a woman founder in the Australian ecosystem, like is that more difficult than it would be? But is that more of an issue here?
(28:11)I don’t know. One, I’m a woman so I only know what it’s like to be a woman. So as far as I’m concerned, like all those interactions are just the same way, why would they be different from anyone else, they are but that’s the life experience I have.
The second one bias is that I do hardware. That’s the big second bias anywhere in the world, hardware is always harder. There is an inherent bias against hardware because most professional investors don’t understand, cause they’ve not built it, fair enough they’ve usually made their money in software and hardware is a different skill that it is a different team. And to some extent, that’s understandable. But there is a unique advantage with hardware that you cannot get with software. And that is because, yes, it is harder and it is longer to get to a product. But when you are there, you have way fewer competitors than doing software. My company has two global competitors. That’s it, two.
(29:46)Let’s have a chat about the actual hardware. Since we’re talking about it, you’re wearing it right now I assume.
(29:54)I am wearing a park.
(29:56)So at dinner last night you walked in wearing it and your attention is drawn to it, right? So tell me a bit about I suppose. What you’re wearing now, what it can actually do ?
(30:07)I’m wearing right now the Canaria Park 4.1. We just launched this literally two weeks ago. So this is a wearable device that clips onto your belt or an armband. It looks like a park. Hence the name with an alert system, which is set to ambient rainbow at the moment. But this is reading my vital signs. This device has been made to predict both cognitive fatigue and extreme heat exhaustion simultaneously. Which are of the two biggest problems in aerospace resources and defence with personnel.
(31:33)I mean, just to know around cognitive fatigue, like how nuances that so do you. Can you tell?
(32:02)So there are a few different ways to get cognitive fatigue. We base it on heart rate variability, which is one of the best early warning indicators for predicting cognitive fatigues. It’s like your mind and your heart can’t communicate with each other properly when you’re under so much physiological stress. So what our equipment is able to pick up on is extreme incidents. Like we can’t tell when you’re a bit tired, but if you have been working for 16 hours and you’re 10 minutes away from passing out, that’s when we can detect that you’re at high risk.
(32:44)Do you ever find yourself in that zone?
(33:53)Again this has been validated in academia, but with long distance driving and with extreme sport. But this was the first time in the company that we had replicated an academic study and had proved for ourselves that, yes, this is an accurate marker for cognitive fatigue.
(34:11)I’m interested in your vision now, having been in this for 3.5 years and the nine months in the garage. What do you see is wearable technology or the future of our sort of symbiosis with this kind of tech as humans?
(34:32)It’s a good question. I guess we can break out into 2 different questions, one being where do I want my company? The other one being like What do I genuinely see the future as? Do you have an intersection? So the first one is that it’s not necessarily just wearable devices. I envision us, and I’m working towards us becoming the world’s best predictive biometrics company. Now, the second one is where do you think the future is going with wearables and humans? I think a lot of it depends on how governments handle legislation over the next five years. One of the things that we’re doing and one of things that we get the most amount of pushback on which I think it’s completely understandable, is how is my data going to be used? For us, we’re developing to a standard whereby we hope that we will lay down the foundations for what legislation for these predictive variables should be.
(36:40)And the future will really depend on whether this technology is legislated to work with human beings, to help them avoid pitfalls just to help them in general, or whether they end up being used as a tool of control against us.
(37:00)What’s your personal thoughts on that? I mean data security, data privacy comes up a lot in the podcasts, and we talk about it a lot because you can see in a medical application this being, you know, if we have predicted technology that can predict cancer, that can predict epileptic fits, why would you not want to have that? But then, in the wrong hands, and from an insurance perspective. If the government all of a sudden has information about your health and is basing insurance premiums on that, that’s not information you’d want out there.
(37:33)It’s true, and this is why I nail it down to the importance of legislation. Today I have seen a handful of companies playing in the same way, not just our competitors, but other companies and predicted biometric systems.
(39:43)You mentioned Brexit before that we’re in an interesting climate, right? So you never know what’s around the corner.. I think it will take something quite scary to shake up people, Facebook hacks not going to do it.
(40:12)That’s already happened in the UK. There was an NHS protocol that was attempted to be implemented, but they did already try doing this in the UK.
(40:45)That’s where legislation really comes into play. What’s your personal day to day, like, do you think about your data online, you’re on social media? Are you concerned about that kind of stuff?
(41:20)Yeah, of course I do. Of course I do depend on different levels. I don’t really care about social media very much because my social media is curated, I have a team that helps me with that. But do I get worried when the Royal Bank of Scotland has a system breakdown and I can’t access my banking information? Yeah, that’s very, very concerning. I do my best to make sure that I don’t have the same password for everything. Yeah, the answer is yes, you can tell I’m scrabbling around now because yes, it is such a big concern for me day to day.
(42:15)Yeah and I exist in exactly the same space.
(43:50)I take extra precaution with data privacy with my company. Of course, we definitely don’t apply that to ourselves.
(45:00)Do you think you see yourself here in another five years in the same space? Or are you going to go back to the garage and study something else and come out with some new idea?
(45:10)I’m in it to win it. I’ll be here with my company for as long as it takes to become the world’s best predicted biometric company.
(45:22)Can’t wait to watch that journey.
