The GP inventor - controlling a computer with your ear

Can a doctor become a tech entrepreneur?

Doctors can sometimes seem a conservative breed when it comes to innovation, though as they struggle with a heavy workload in a health service under pressure, it’s hard to blame them. An old friend, a consultant who every now and then took on a management role, complained that trying to get his colleagues to agree to changes was like herding cats - “they seemed to think all my decisions about how the hospital should run were just options which they could ignore.”

But GPs, who have long been obliged to be more entrepreneurial than hospital doctors, running their own businesses, are perhaps more likely to think outside the box. I’ve been speaking to one who’s gone as far as giving up his practice to focus on the medtech innovation he has invented.

Dr Nick Gompertz with the prototype Earswitch. Picture: Nic Delves-Broughton

That invention is called the Earswitch, and Dr Nick Gompertz believes it’s a major breakthrough, “a whole new human computer interface that's not been developed before.” The idea is to use a muscle in the ear to control a computer, offering hope of speeding up communication for people with conditions such as Motor Neurone Disease.

Dr Gompertz had been a GP in Somerset for 20 years when he came up with the idea. He’d seen a documentary about. a 13 year old boy with severe cerebral palsy who had written a whole book with eye tracking technology, his mother holding his head while he painstakingly picked out each letter: “I just thought there must be a better way.”

He experimented with a tiny USB camera, looking inside his own ear. “You can actually see the eardrum move when you tense its muscle. I just took some open source movement detection software built for security cameras, used that, and linked it in to send a keystroke to the keyboard.”

He had reproduced the way Professor Stephen Hawking communicated, using the movement of the eardrum rather than the twitch of his cheek which sent signals to the professor’s system. Dr Gompertz is quick to stress that he isn’t providing a complex machine-learning system of the kind that Hawking was given in 2014 but something much simpler: “We are a switch - you can do with it what you like, rather than trying to compete when there's really good technology out there.”

But as it is thought that control of the ear muscle is something that people with conditions such as Motor Neurone Disease retain after other functions are lost, this system could have great promise as an assistive technology. Nick Gompertz reckons it could also have applications in other areas such as gaming - and he’s thinking big: “The ultimate aim would be that every (Apple) Airpod would actually have a switch sensor in it. So that actually just becomes a whole new interface.”

Nevertheless, getting from an idea to something that can be a viable product that gets regulatory approval as a medical device promises to be a long and expensive journey. Dr Gompertz has teamed up with the University of Bath and won a grant from the National Institute of Health to carry on developing the device. He’s also working with the University of the West of England’s Robotics Innovation Facility on using Earswitch as a way of controlling robots.

And this is now his full-time job. “I was doing this in my spare time from 2018, and then in August last year I decided I can’t do this.” He gave up his work as a GP for the very different world of a startup entrepreneur - meeting business angels, applying for patents, working out when to take on staff.

Earswitch is still a long shot but if it succeeds Dr Gompertz could end up having as great an impact on patient wellbeing as he did as a GP.