Hacking The Brain: Czech Neurotech Startup Stimvia Brings AI To Non-Invasive BCI
Lukáš Doskočil, founder and CEO of Stimvia
Stimvia, a Czech startup founded by medical device executive Lukáš Doskočil, has developed a non-invasive neuromodulation system that uses electrical pulses to stimulate deep brain structures through the leg. Called URIS, the technology was first deployed to treat overactive bladder, but now shows early promise for a range of neurological disorders including Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, and Restless Leg Syndrome, which is treated with Parkinson's medication.
A patient secures URIS sensors behind the knee, where a nerve provides access to the central nervous ... More system.
At the core of Stimvia's approach is what Doskočil calls a "hack" into the brain via the peroneal nerve behind the knee. The URIS system uses proprietary non-invasive electrodes to send electrical signals along afferent nerve pathways to the prefrontal cortex, eliminating the need for invasive implants or surgery. "We did a mechanistic study using functional MRI and showed stimulation effects in deep brain structures," Doskočil told me. "That's never been done non-invasively before."
Patients can easily control the intensity and duration of the treatment.
Pilot studies testing the Stimvia URIS device for treating Parkinson's disease have turned heads in the neurology and urology communities. A study conducted at Ostrava University Hospital found that Parkinson's patients using URIS experienced measurable reductions in resting tremor and improvements in quality of life. 'Patients showed marked improvement in motor symptoms and overall well-being, with quality-of-life scores surpassing clinically meaningful thresholds. All without serious side effects,' said Professor David Skoloudik, Vice-Dean for Research at Ostrava University's Medical Faculty. A separate clinical paper notes URIS® may outperform traditional sacral and tibial nerve stimulation in treating bladder dysfunction without the needles or surgery.
Stimvia's URIS device is connected to a companion app that collects data from each session, monitors patient symptoms, and adapts the stimulation protocol accordingly. Its latest version uses an AI-driven virtual assistant to optimize electrode placement and fine-tune pulse parameters in real time. "You could call it a virtual doctor," Doskočil said. It personalizes treatment using real-time body feedback, which represents a breakthrough for non-invasive therapy.'
Stimvia's non-invasion URIS treatments are also painless. Patients are able to read, watch tv, or ... More even nap while undergoing treatment.
The field is dominated by billion-dollar U.S. companies like Medtronic and Abbott. Boston Scientific last year bought Stimiva's competitor, Axonics, which also treats overactive bladder disorders, for almost $4B. Stimvia is small but agile. With 15 employees and manufacturing based in Pardubice, CZ, the company has already raised $8 million and is preparing a Series A round. It has shipped more than 200 units and is actively expanding across Europe. Denmark was the first foreign market, but the device is now being adopted in clinics across France, Italy, Spain, Greece, the Netherlands, and the UK. Stimvia recently earned MDR certification from German standards body TÜV SÜD, opening the door to reimbursement in EU healthcare systems and clearing a path toward FDA approval.
Patients can control the intensity and duration of the URIS treatment for Parkinson's symptoms.
The implications go beyond overactive bladder, which affects 500 million people globally and is quietly responsible for a massive adult diaper industry and associated greenhouse gas emissions. 'The actual number is likely much higher and may approach the 1 billion mark, given a prevalence of around 16% among adults—surpassing even diabetes,' Doskočil told me. 'However, it remains a highly stigmatized condition that will become increasingly significant as the population ages.'
According to Wired Czechia, investors have taken notice. Stimvia is backed by local venture funds like Xenocles, Venture Capital Partners and Purple Ventures, with another five to ten million in new funding expected soon. But Doskočil, who is not a doctor but trained in economics and medical technology, says Europe's fragmented reimbursement landscape makes it harder to scale. That's why the company is now setting its sights on the United States, where one FDA approval covers 50 states.
'It's not easy to innovate in Europe,' Doskočil told me. 'Every country is different. The U.S. is one market. That changes everything.' Stimvia is hiring a commercial team in Miami, including a new chief commercial officer with prior experience at LivaNova. The U.S. rollout will also include investigator-led trials, with hopes of replicating European success in a much larger market.
Stimvia's technology offers new hope for patients with a range of brain-related conditions, from Parkinson's tremors to overactive bladder. As Doskočil says, 'OAB is a brain disease masquerading as a bladder problem,' highlighting how many disorders traditionally treated by symptoms are actually rooted deeply in the brain. With non-invasive neuromodulation, Stimvia is pioneering a new way to treat these conditions, changing lives without surgery or implants.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
SAINT-GOBAIN ENHANCES ITS DIGITAL CONSTRUCTION CHEMICALS PLATFORM WITH THE ACQUISITION OF MATURIX
PARIS, June 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Saint-Gobain announces the next step in the expansion of its digital construction chemicals platform with the acquisition of Maturix, based in Denmark, a leading provider of real-time monitoring solutions for the concrete industry. Maturix offers cutting-edge wireless sensor technology which allows remote real-time monitoring of concrete properties during the curing and hardening process, enabling contractors to optimize their operations and ease traceability requirements. This reduces the duration of the concrete construction cycle by up to 50% and improves job-site efficiency, all while improving concrete quality and ensuring a high level of structural performance. Maturix and Saint-Gobain have successfully collaborated since 2019. This acquisition enhances Saint-Gobain's digital solutions offering across the concrete and cement value chains, enabling the Group's customers to reduce overdesign and optimize operations. Saint-Gobain spearheaded the digital transformation of the concrete industry initiated by GCP with Verifi®, its market-leading digital in-transit concrete management suite, deployed across three continents (North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific). Verifi® uses real-time monitoring to reduce waste, improve operational performance and drive cost efficiencies. Maturix perfectly complements Verifi® in optimizing concrete placement on site. The two companies are already working on a joint offering. The acquisition of Maturix demonstrates the Group's commitment to expanding its offer of integrated digital solutions for its customers. Sid Singh, CEO of Verifi®, comments: "By combining the data and digital expertise of Maturix and Verifi® with Saint-Gobain's leadership in concrete admixtures, we will unlock new use cases for the Group's customers. We will provide them with personalized recommendations to manage their operations with increased visibility and precision to reduce their costs and environmental impact." About Saint-Gobain Worldwide leader in light and sustainable construction, Saint-Gobain designs, manufactures and distributes materials and services for the construction and industrial markets. Its integrated solutions for the renovation of public and private buildings, light construction and the decarbonization of construction and industry are developed through a continuous innovation process and provide sustainability and performance. The Group, celebrating its 360th anniversary in 2025, remains more committed than ever to its purpose "MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER HOME". - €46.6 billion in sales in 2024 - More than 161,000 employees, locations in 80 countries - Committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 For more information about Saint-Gobain, visit and follow us on X @saintgobain Contacts: Patricia Marie - Laure Bencheikh - Yanice Biyogo - View original content: SOURCE Saint-Gobain Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
38 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Interview: James Neville CEO of Yaspa
With over 10 years of experience as a founder, as well as holding previous roles as CTO at Worldpay and Just Eat, James Neville, CEO of Yaspa, is perfectly qualified to discuss all things related to open banking and payments. He is also one of the payments sector's leading experts in identity verification. It is rather stating the obvious to note that open banking has the potential to revolutionise payments. It offers faster, more secure, and cost-effective transactions. But Yaspa's research highlights a key challenge: naming conventions matter. Pay-by-Bank, Pay by bank account, Account-to-account payments, A2A, Open banking. Instant payments are all terms used to refer to the same, simple method of a payment made from one bank account to another. That is a payment initiated through open banking providers, meaning consumers avoid the chore of typing in, checking and verifying the transfer details. 'Pay by Bank' is gaining traction, but its meaning remains ambiguous to many consumers. This is one key takeaway from the Yaspa Index 2025, launched to act as a benchmark for industry awareness and to provide valuable insights for businesses looking to optimise their payment offerings. 55% of UK adults report familiarity with the term 'Pay by Bank', but 45% remain unaware of the phrase despite its growing presence in online checkouts; Security (72%) and ease of use (66%) are the top priorities for consumers choosing a payment method; QR code payments are on the rise, yet only 27% of respondents used them for transactions in the past year, and Consumer education remains critical to driving open banking adoption, particularly in high-growth sectors such as gaming and retail. Neville tells EPI that there is still an element of consumer education that needs to happen and that it is very demographic dependent. That is a polite way of saying that towards the older range of the demographic spectrum that there is work to do, 'A lot of people are using the new tools without knowing the actual banking terms for the tools they're using. We don't expect consumers to really understand the mechanics of it. Pay by bank, knowing that you're using your banking app or the bank services to make a payment and the need to differentiate from cards - that is important.' If open banking is ever to realise its full potential, issues such as data transparency, improvements in payment execution and enhanced fraud prevention are essential. Yaspa is committed to driving these changes, working with industry partners to help shape a more seamless and secure future for open banking payments. Neville is also championing the standardisation of language related to open banking across the industry to help boost consumer understanding and adoption. The challenge then is to ensure that consumers understand the benefits to them of using instant bank payments. For example, speed, security, control and fewer input errors. And then, once consumers have used it in one place, recognising it's available as an option in another place, even if it's from a different provider. Looking ahead, Neville is optimistic that open banking can deliver a frictionless experience for businesses and consumers alike. With the right enhancements, it could soon rival - and even surpass - traditional card payments in convenience, security, and efficiency. 'We're pretty unique in the space in that we connect identity and money. So we do lots of clever things, like providing bank identity on the transaction itself, and we provide financial health of that individual at the point of payment.' Yaspa already operates across 19 European markets and is now plotting expansion in the Americas. Neville has good reason to look ahead with optimism. "Interview: James Neville CEO of Yaspa" was originally created and published by Retail Banker International, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Gaia, Europe's Galactic Cartographer, Is Gone But Not Forgotten
This observatory has probably been the most transformative astronomy project of the 21st century, but there's a good chance you've never heard of it. Just last week, for instance, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City debuted a new 'space show' called Encounters in the Milky Way—and this often overlooked spacecraft is its scientific superstar. But you're more likely to know about actor Pedro Pascal's narration in the show than you are to be familiar with the single space mission that serves as the presentation's backbone. The observatory is called Gaia. And, like so many good things, you wouldn't really miss it until it's gone—and now it is. Launched in 2013 by the European Space Agency (ESA), it ceased operations this past March, when it used what little fuel it had left to steer into a graveyard orbit around the sun. From its station in a quiescent region of deep space more than 1.6 million kilometers from Earth, Gaia's mission was, in essence, quite simple: it was designed to give us a better sense of where we are—a celestial 'reference frame' on overlapping interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic scales. To do that, it used twin sky-sweeping telescopes and three instruments, including a billion-pixel camera, to painstakingly measure the distances, positions, motions, and more of about two billion celestial objects, most of them stars in our own galaxy. It made some three trillion observations in all, producing (among many other things) the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of the Milky Way ever made. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] 'Gaia was our best galactic cartographer, and I sometimes say that Encounters in the Milky Way is my love letter to it,' says Jackie Faherty, a senior research scientist at the AMNH, who curated the new space show and regularly works with Gaia data. 'It turns out you can learn a lot by determining where and how far off the stars are from you—and especially by how they are moving.... Gaia's creation of this map is something we all should celebrate because it's just as iconic and useful as the maps of Earth we all see in school or pull up on Google. Looking at it, you can find and explore all sorts of different things you want to know.' From Gaia's map, more than 13,000 peer-reviewed studies have already emerged, and many have concerned the fundamental structure and deep history of the Milky Way. Thanks to Gaia, scientists now can better gauge the amount of dark matter within our galaxy and have been able to track the Milky Way's growth and evolution across eons via relic streams of stars strewn from ancient mergers with other, smaller galaxies. 'Stars retain memories of their origins in their ages, motions and chemical compositions—all of which Gaia measured,' says Amina Helmi, an astronomer at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands. She and her colleagues used the mission's data to discover evidence of a major galactic merger that, some 10 billion years ago, shaped our home galaxy into the Milky Way we know today. 'With all that information, it was like a veil being lifted,' Helmi says. 'We could suddenly perform what's sometimes called 'galactic archaeology,' reconstructing the Milky Way's history to see when and how this merger happened with another, smaller galaxy that was about a third to a quarter of our galaxy's mass.... Gaia allows us to look billions of years into the Milky Way's history—before our solar system even formed—to see what actually happened back then, which is absolutely amazing.' Tracing perturbations from one more recent and ongoing merger, astronomers have even managed to reveal an apparent warp in the Milky Way's disk, offering a new twist—literally—on the classic image of our cosmic home. At smaller scales, the spacecraft has refined the orbits of more than 150,000 asteroids, surveilling hundreds of them to see if they have their own moons. It has spied hints of thousands of worlds and even a few black holes orbiting other stars. At larger scales, it has helped estimate the expansion rate of the universe, and it has also teased out the subtle tugging of the Milky Way's heart upon the solar system across tens of thousands of light-years. Gaia's sprawling cosmic reckoning is now a cornerstone for most state-of-the-art Earth- and space-based telescopes, which rely on the mission's target-dense celestial map to orient and calibrate their own observations and operations. Whether it's NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, ESA's Euclid mission, the ground-based, U.S.-built Vera C. Rubin Observatory or Europe's under-construction Extremely Large Telescope, practically all of the world's most exciting starlight-gathering telescopes will, in some sense, be guided by Gaia. And stunningly, the best is yet to come. More than two thirds of the mission's treasure trove of data is still under wraps. It is being prepared in a time-consuming process for two major upcoming milestones: about half of Gaia's total data are targeted for release next year, and the mission's full data are set to arrive no earlier than 2030. But because it didn't beam back images ready-made for lush wall posters and desktop backgrounds, Gaia was destined from the start to be 'criminally under-recognized outside astronomy,' says Mark McCaughrean, an astronomer and former senior adviser to ESA. 'And because Gaia provided utterly essential, if mundane, information such as precise stellar distances, it's been doomed with this curse of simultaneous ubiquity and obscurity as many people use its data but take it for granted as just 'coming from a catalog.'' Anthony Brown, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who leads the mission's data processing and analysis group, puts it most succinctly: 'For astronomers, Gaia has become almost like the air you breathe,' he says. At the heart of Gaia's mapmaking is a technique called astrometry, the measurement of celestial positions and motions in the plane of the sky. Paired with a phenomenon called parallax—the apparent shift of an object's position when viewed from two vantage points—astronomers can use Gaia for determining distances, too. You can see the parallax effect with your own two eyes: hold your thumb out at arm's length and watch as it appears to jump around as you blink one eye and then the other. The closer the object is, the bigger its displacement will be. And the bigger your baseline is between two vantage points, the smaller the displacement will be that you can discern. Your eyes have a baseline of about six centimeters; Gaia's was 300 million kilometers, set by the opposite sides of Earth's orbit around the sun. A Gaia predecessor, ESA's Hipparcos mission, used that same gigantic baseline to survey the sky from 1989 until it ran out of fuel in 1993. But the technology of the time limited Hipparcos's astrometric reckoning to a precision of about one milliarcsecond, with high-quality measurements only for about 100,000 objects within about 200 parsecs (650 light-years) of the solar system. (A single arc second is a very small angular slice of the heavens, making Hipparcos's milliarcsecond precision all the more noteworthy. The moon, for instance, takes up about 1,800 arc seconds in Earth's sky.) As impressive as Hipparcos was, Gaia shattered the records set by its precursor—although not without challenges, such as precision-threatening sprays of stray light that leaked around the edges of the spacecraft's sun shield and through a hole punched by an errant micrometeoroid. But ultimately, Brown says, Gaia's measurements achieved on the order of 100 times greater precision—reaching about 10 microarcseconds. And within the Milky Way, the spacecraft's view encompassed 100 times more volume and included 10 times more targets. The numbers underpinning Gaia are so alien to everyday experience that they border on nonsensical, says Michael Perryman, a former ESA researcher, who has served as project scientist for Hipparcos and Gaia and played a crucial developmental role for both missions. He likens Hipparcos's precision to discerning a second's worth of growth of a human hair from a distance of one meter. Gaia's 100-times-better view, he says, is more like measuring the width of a single hydrogen atom from the same distance. Another comparison involves the size of the two missions' datasets. When the Hipparcos team printed out its complete catalog, Perryman recalls, it comprised five thick volumes—almost enough to fill a single shelf of a bookcase. Printing out the full Gaia catalog with the same density of information per page, he says, would require about 10 kilometers of shelf space. 'The mind boggles,' he says. 'It's almost incomprehensible; these are numbers and dimensions we're simply not equipped to visualize, so even the analogies are very difficult to grasp.' The best example of the heights such precision can reach may be Gaia's tour de force determination of the solar system's acceleration with respect to a vast, sky-encompassing field of quasars. Quasars are the conspicuously bright cores of remote galaxies that harbor actively feeding supermassive black holes. As such, quasars are among the most powerful beacons astronomers can use to probe distant regions of the universe. Gaia pinpointed the positions of more than one and a half million of them to establish a fixed backdrop of sorts, against which various minuscule motions of our solar system or other nearby celestial objects could be seen. One motion Gaia managed to measure was an astonishingly small acceleration of just 0.232 nanometer per second squared—a continuous atom-scale deflection in the solar system's 220-kilometer-per-second trajectory through the Milky Way, attributed to the gravitational pull from our galaxy's center some 26,000 light-years away. Writ large, the displacement adds up to less than a meter per day—and essentially reflects the real-time sculpting of our galactic orbit as the solar system carves a path through the Milky Way's gravitational field. 'It's an almost circular motion around the galactic center, and it's directed toward the supermassive black hole there,' says astronomer Sergei Klioner of Germany's Dresden University of Technology, who led much of the work behind the measurement. 'No other observational data could come anywhere close to competing with Gaia here.... You often hear the term 'astronomical' in the sense of something being very large—but this is an example where Gaia has shown us something that's astronomically small.' Now that Gaia has gone dark, there's already talk of what comes next. 'Do we really need another astrometry mission?' asks Brown, who first began working on Gaia in 1997. 'Well, not immediately, but the extremely precise stellar reference frame it gave us—upon which many other observatories depend—will eventually deteriorate because all the stars are moving, right?' ESA is envisioning a follow-on mission, which would potential launching in the 2040s. This time that mission would be optimized for infrared observations to allow astronomers to see through the dust that otherwise clouds their view of the Milky Way's star-packed disk and galactic center. 'It's, in a way, wonderful but also a bit sad that people take Gaia for granted because, my God, it was a tough mission,' Perryman reflects. 'I don't feel sadness that it's gone; I'm just delighted and relieved it lasted so long, and I'm very conscious of how remarkable it is that we live in a time when society is willing to pool its resources to support such things, and we have the technology in place to do them. I hope this period continues—but I worry we've been taking that for granted, too.'
