About Us
PURPOSE. PEOPLE. PROCESS.NIRSleep is developing and deploying a wearable sensor to measure brain activity. We use infrared light to non-invasively measure changing oxygen concentration in the user’s brain, and relate this to changes in the user’s condition. The NIRSleep system is lightweight and easy to use, opening exciting new opportunities for detecting and tracking cerebrovascular changes in real life environments (i.e non-laboratory and out-of-clinic remote monitoring).
OUR TEAM
Casey Boutwell, PhD, MBA
Chief Executive Officer
Casey@NIRSleep.com
Dr. Boutwell’s research background focused on optical sensor development, and his professional experience includes intellectual property strategy, technology licensing/negotiation, and business development.
He contributes his technical expertise in optoelectronics; business experience in technology commercialization, intellectual property, and licensing strategy; and professional network in digital health and wearable biosensing systems.
Jason Strohmaier, MSEE
Chief Technology Officer
Jason@BionicaLabs.com
Mr. Strohmaier’s broad experience with systems engineering includes low-power wearable sensors, microfluidics, and general electronics.
His prior employments integrated research-scale technologies in early-stage companies and in academia.
Callie Kimberly
Chief Operating Officer
Callie@NIRSleep.com
1st Lt (ret.) Kimberly’s expertise in operations and administration developed with her executive support in the US Air Force.
She is broadly skilled and process-oriented, focusing on operations optimization and process flow, managing stakeholder communication and contractor engagement.
Jared Allen, ME
Director of Engineering
NIRSleep@NIRSleep.com
We were pleased to bring our first engineer onboard in August 2019. Mr. Allen’s background primarily consists of the development of life-supporting, wearable class III medical electrical devices in the cardiovascular space. His recent experience spans the electronics, firmware, human factors engineering, and project management domains at early and mid-stage start-up companies.
Brett Goldbach, BS
Electrical Engineer III — Embedded Systems
NIRSleep@NIRSleep.com
We were pleased to bring our third engineer onboard in July 2020. Mr. Goldbach’s background primarily consists of designing PCB layouts for prototypes through to final production, and designing and implementing multi-threaded firmware in embedded C. His testing and certification experience will help further the product development and prototyping efforts of the NIRSleep team.
Nicholas Marotta, AS
Field Electronics Engineer
NIRSleep@NIRSleep.com
We were pleased to bring our Field Engineer onboard in November 2020. Mr. Marotta’s background primarily consists of software and hardware engineering support, and medical device troubleshooting and root cause analysis. His training and manufacturing process experience will help further the product development and prototyping efforts of the NIRSleep team.
Bryan Hellriegel, BS
Senior Product Design Engineer
NIRSleep@NIRSleep.com
We were pleased to bring our Senior Product Design Engineer onboard in September 2021. Mr. Hellriegel’s background primarily consists of innovating devices from conceptualization through production. His engineering management experience will help further the product development, V/V testing and fabrication efforts of the NIRSleep team. His efforts will focus on scaling the NIRSleep prototype design and manufacturing capabilities.
Thibault Roumengous, PhD
Lead Scientist
NIRSleep@NIRSleep.com
We were pleased to bring our Lead Scientist onboard in January 2022. Dr. Roumengous has a PhD in Biomedical Engineering. His background primarily consists of near-infrared spectrometry signals processing and analysis. He spent two years interning with us and worked on a state-of-the-art fNIRS signal processing pipeline for internal research and military applications. Dr. Roumengous will be contributing to human subject research and experimental design, and will support our engineering team on hardware, software, and algorithm development.
Our History
The original research behind NIRSleep was developed through a 2014 grant from the National Institutes of Health to NC State University. This research was published in a 2017 peer-reviewed research paper and demonstrated the preliminary ability to classify slow wave sleep (SWS), in addition to tracking heart rate and respiratory rate in comparison to the clinical gold standard, polysomnography.
In this preliminary participant group’s data, the device accurately identified Obstructive Sleep Apnea and predicted SWS from optical data in most cases. NIRSleep exclusively licensed worldwide commercial rights in all fields of use to the associated Intellectual Property from NC State University in 2018.
