This past April, Dave Segal found himself onstage at the Edison Awards, the annual Oscars of innovation, delivering a midday demo. The audience was a collection of the world’s most pedigreed nerds: Gwynne Shotwell, COO and president of SpaceX, was there, as was Laurie Leshin, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Attendees included elite scientists and executives from every corner of tech, from adhesives to robotics.
Segal doesn’t fit the profile of the typical inventor. Forty-seven years old and built like a grappler, he doesn’t have a PhD or even an undergrad degree. But there he was on that spring day, a few yards up the Caloosahatchee River from the old Thomas Edison estate in Fort Myers, Florida, presenting his creation to the brainiac assembly.
Dave Segal, inventor of the Naqi Logix earbud.
Photo: Micah E. Wood
“Roughly 10 years ago,” he recounted, “I read an article about an Iraq war veteran who stepped on a roadside bomb, lost his limbs, and suffered severe paralysis. He was getting fashioned with a brand-new, shiny, ‘thought-controlled’ prosthetic arm. And as a technologist, I asked myself, Wow, is thought control even real? What if I can create a novel neural interface that would allow somebody to command, control, and navigate computers, phones, wheelchairs, smart homes, IoT, robotics, AI—in a hands-free, voice-free, and sometimes even screen-free manner? It’s fair to say, that was really the beginning of the journey.”
Segal gestured for a young man in the wings to take center stage, and William Smith, a 26-year-old proposal specialist for Kansas City, Missouri-based engineering firm Black & Veatch,