McMahon to offer strategy and business guidance on bringing breakthrough technologies to mass market
Neosensory, a neuroscience-based company that empowers people with new senses, announced today that Katie McMahon has joined the company as a strategic business advisor.
Her appointment comes as Neosensory’s first two products gain traction and the company continues its focus on the development of proprietary, industry-defining devices to address hearing and sensory expansion.
Katie is a global entrepreneur and technology executive, with a dynamic career spent in sound recognition and voice AI space, first as a VP at Shazam in London and later VP and GM at SoundHound in Silicon Valley. She is credited with guiding Shazam’s breakout success as one of the first apps to launch on the iPhone, and she led the product to becoming an iconic utility which is now integrated on iPhones.
Neosensory launched Buzz for Sound Awareness, the wearable wristband that allows people to sense sound through vibrations on their skin, in early 2020. Rooted in technology conceived in Dr. David Eagleman’s neuroscience laboratory, Buzz is a non-invasive device for people to experience sound in a new way. It has been adopted by deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing people around the world. With Buzz, users can directly feel the sounds around them, from babies crying or friends speaking to doorbells and fire alarms. Buzz users report how being aware of the sounds around them positively impacts their sense of independence, safety, and overall connection with the world.
In early 2021, Neosensory launched Neosensory Duo, a program for tinnitus (ringing in the ears) based on the scientifically-proven approach of bimodal stimulation: combining sounds and touch.
Their third product – an AI solution for age-related hearing loss, which affects 2 billion people around the world – will debut early next year.
Beyond hearing, other uses allow people to feel their avatar’s limbs inside VR/AR, intuitively sensing where hands and fingers are in a metaverse, and sensing objects at a distance.
Additionally, third-party developers have demonstrated new use cases by harnessing Neosensory’s technology. For example, one product helps firefighters “see” by translating infrared information into touch. Another allows children with autism to haptically read the emotion of the person they are speaking with by using dynamic AI analysis of the audio stream.
McMahon’s experience in launching consumer products and software platforms brings additional perspective on opening opportunities with third-party developers and creators to enable new immersive experiences through augmented senses.
As a pioneer in the mobile era, McMahon has over twenty years of experience in helping companies bring innovations from the lab to product creation and product-market fit. She worked in Japan at the world’s first mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) and later launched a MVNO company in Tokyo, combining hardware, software, and value-added service to sell direct-to-consumer. Recipient of the the Project Voice “Outstanding Achievement Award,” McMahon is considered a thought leader across the Voice AI industry and has been a trusted advisor to start-ups and growth-stage founders.
“With global experience across mobile, sound recognition, voice AI and AR, Katie brings unique operator experience in taking early-stage technologies and getting them into the hands of daily users, creating profound new user habits,” said Dr. Eagleman, CEO and Co-founder of Neosensory. “She connects the dots and knows how to build towards the white space. With strong partnership development experience, her guidance for enabling new technologies for distribution and ultimately scale to the mass market has great value for us. We are thrilled to work with her and activate her talent in our journey to change lives through Neosensory’s technology.”
“The rare combination of truly visionary concepts, rooted in neuroscience, and a team which can execute across hardware and software is what makes Neosensory extraordinary,” commented Katie McMahon. “I’m thrilled to work with the team of talented people at Neosensory, where we can make the vision a concrete reality. In years to come, we can look forward to a better quality of life and sustained connections with loved ones through Neosensory’s augmented hearing solutions. I’m also excited to enable developers and creators to build meaningful use cases that span life-saving utilities to immersive AR/VR and metaverse experiences through sensory augmentation.”Around 466 million people across the world are affected by deafness and disabling hearing issues according to the World Health Organization. Neosensory will continue to increase awareness of new technologies and non-invasive options to the health and wellness community. With the anticipated market size of AR/VR of $1.5 trillion by 2030, Neosensory’s pioneering work in creating products for data to be streamed through the skin and interpreted by the brain has ushered in the era of human sensory augmentation.