Indiana University Bloomington announced that MBA graduate Greg Mattes has been named the winner of the school’s third annual Building Entrepreneurs in Software and Technology competition.
Mattes, a 2014 graduate of Indiana University (IU)’s Kelley School of Business, will receive $100,000 in start-up funding for his company, Analog Computing Solutions, which will focus on technological improvements for prosthetic devices and hearing aids.
Mattes won the Building Entrepreneurs in Software and Technology (BEST) competition by creating a business plan to improve the quality, speed and longevity of hearing aids and myoelectric prostheses. His company will seek to improve the computing capabilities for the advanced sound filtering algorithms being used in hearing aid research. The low-power, high-speed architecture of extended analog computers can also be used to improve the signal processing functionality of the latest myoelectric prostheses, according to an IU press release.
“It has been great to receive validation from an external group that we had a strong business case, and it is also nice to see the hard work start to pay off,” Mattes, who will serve as president and CEO of Analog Computing Solutions, said. “BEST was a fun experience for me. It was a clear and transparent process, and I was able to put my Kelley MBA skills to work.”
A focus of the company is to improve the function of myoelectric prostheses, which allow residual muscles to transmit signals through the skin to control movements of the prosthetic arm and hand. Specifically, in work funded by the National Science Foundation, Analog Computing Solutions is addressing the computing challenge presented by targeted muscle reinnervation.
“The dramatic increase in the number and density of electrode sites, and need to implant multi-electrode structures into targeted muscles, will increase the signal processing requirements beyond the power and speed capabilities of the traditional mobile digital signal processing used in these devices,” Mattes said.
