Myo

~ the goodbye ~

myo was a hardware demo that kept looking for the problem it solved. it was an armband that sensed the electricity in your forearm muscles, so a clench or a finger flick became a command. as demos went it was genuinely impressive, and i watched a few of them the way an engineer watches any clever sensor. i never bought one, because nobody could quite tell me what it was for.

thalmic labs built it in ontario, announced it in february 2013 to a wave of preorders, and shipped it in 2014 at around two hundred dollars. the funding was serious for a gesture gadget, over one hundred and thirty million dollars, with amazon's alexa fund and intel capital among the backers. on paper it could drive a slideshow or steer a small drone by hand.

that last part is where my own corner of the field noticed it. i work on computer vision for drones, and a wristband that let you fly one with a gesture was the kind of thing that circulated as a video. but a video is not a daily habit. the myo was a thing people admired and then set down, which is a hard place for a two-hundred-dollar accessory to live.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

the idea behind myo was electromyography, reading muscle signals off the skin, which had lived mostly in labs and in prosthetics research. thalmic's bet was that the same sensing could be a mainstream input device, a mouse you wore instead of held. it demoed well for surgeons keeping their hands sterile and for amputees driving prosthetic hands, the serious uses. for everyone else it was a party trick you had to recalibrate every time you put it on.

~ what it became ~

thalmic did not go bankrupt, it changed the subject. in october 2018 it stopped selling myo and renamed itself north, pouring everything into focals, a pair of normal-looking smart glasses. focals did not sell either. google bought north in 2020 for its patents and its people and shut the glasses down. the myo research vanished into a much larger company. the armband still has a small afterlife among hobbyists who kept the drivers alive, but as a product it ended when the company stopped believing in it.

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