This startup built a Fitbit for your brain to combat chronic stress

Antonio Forenza was working as head of research and development at Rakuten Symphony, a telecom subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate, when he realized that he needed to find a better way to manage his stress levels.

A few years earlier, he had lost 40 pounds with the help of an Apple Watch, which counted steps and tracked his calorie burn, and he began wondering if there was a similar device to assess his stress.

“I wanted to lose 40 pounds of stress, and realized there’s no wearable for that today,” Forenza told TechCrunch.

That’s when Forenza realized he’d stumbled onto a gap in the consumer health market. Drawing on his engineering background, he decided to build the device himself, using a more than century-old technology: the electroencephalogram (EEG) to detect and measure elect