The Signal for Recovery

“A concussion is not a bump on the head. It is a breakdown in cellular communication — and that is something a smart system can help measure.”

— Erik A. Nilsen, PhD, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer

We have been managing concussions for too long the way we manage a sprained ankle: rest it and wait. For many patients that approach leaves real suffering on the table. The headaches, fatigue, dizziness, and brain fog that follow a concussion can linger for weeks or months, and they fall especially hard on athletes, veterans, and teenagers. The deeper problem is conceptual — we have treated concussion as a simple injury when it is better understood as a breakdown in cellular communication.

That reframing changes what good care could look like. If the disruption is in signaling, then measuring and supporting that signaling — continuously, as healing happens — becomes the goal.

A device that measures while it treats

The concept under development is a wearable PEMF headband that does more than deliver therapy. It combines stimulation coils with a suite of sensors: heart-rate-variability monitoring, eye-tracking, AI algorithms, cognitive testing, and integration with the electronic health record. Crucially, it is designed as a closed-loop system — it reads the body's signals and adapts the therapy based on that feedback, rather than running a fixed program and hoping.

An athlete down with a head injury during play. “Recovery has a signature. If we can measure it, we can design around it.”

— Erik A. Nilsen, PhD, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer

As a clinician, the closed-loop idea is what excites me, because recovery is not linear. A therapy that can adjust to where a patient actually is on a given day is far closer to how good medicine is practiced.

Four targets after injury

The platform focuses on four areas commonly disrupted after concussion: autonomic imbalance, where heart-rate-variability data can reveal a nervous system stuck in overdrive; oculomotor dysfunction, which eye-tracking can detect in subtle deficits of gaze and convergence; neurovascular disruption affecting blood flow to the brain; and cognitive fatigue, tracked through built-in testing.

“Progress in this field is measured patient by patient. That focus is what keeps the mission honest.”

— Ken Mayer, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer

The need is not small. Concussion incidence and the cost of traumatic brain injury in the United States are substantial, and there are not yet FDA-cleared adaptive PEMF devices designed specifically for concussion. Situated within Electrome's modular PEMF platform and its broader recovery ecosystem, this concept points toward a shift I would welcome at the bedside — from passive waiting toward responsive, data-informed recovery.

A wearable sensor headband.