TLI Student Profile: Brian Johnson

Brian Johnson (MDI '25) has a lot to say about health care, artificial intelligence, the pace of technological innovation and how spirituality should guide the creation of artificial life. He earned his Bachelor's in Health Management at the U, and has founded his own startup, Ambient Intelligence, that uses visual information to diagnose the physical and cognitive state of elderly patients. 

He notes that the pace of technological change is still speeding up, and that TLI's Medical Device Innovation program is already helping him in his day-to-day work. He took some time from his busy schedule to talk to us about it.

Q: Brian, tell us where you grew up, and where you did your undergrad work.

A:  I grew up in Southern Minnesota in the New Richland area. I was adopted from Seoul, South Korea, into a Norwegian and Swedish family. I grew up in an environment that had a strong emphasis on education. 

I remember my dad always reading books, he's got a collection of books that is overflowing many bookshelves. My mom was a nurse, and I think that kind of a culture really shaped who I've become today. 

I hold a Bachelor of Science in Health Management from the University of Minnesota and I’m currently in the Medical Device Innovation, M.S. program, class of 2025. 

Q: What do you do for your day job?

I'm the founder of Ambient Intelligence. We're a novel noninvasive contactless sensing company designing and developing devices that detect movement. The hypothesis of our technological system is that movement is the key to understanding physical and cognitive health. This data can be correlated to immediate events, potential infections, and the progression and prediction of dementia. 

Once we have enough data on a person’s movement during the day, we can quantify how much sleep you're getting, when you're waking up, and other health factors based on that change. There's also really sophisticated experimental things you can do with machine learning that can measure movement as a system to predict early dementia and then monitor the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease. 

My research has taken me to some interesting places. Last summer I visited Amsterdam, Bay Area in California, San Antonio, Philadelphia, and others.

Q:  What made you interested in a Medical Device Innovation program, and why did you end up selecting this one? 

A: There are very few advanced degree programs specifically for medical devices. Johns Hopkins and Duke are the others that I am aware of. Bioengineering and other engineering programs may have a medical device focus, but not a specific degree. 

A master’s degree with an innovation focus was one of the main draws. I had talked to our program director, Mark Whede, several times before enrolling, and he was a big influence. He is the Chair of Mayo Clinic Engineering, most people have never been in the same room with someone that smart. He was one of the deciding factors for joining the program and was very generous with his time when deciding on a graduate program. I could tell from early conversations he was clearly a great engineer and engineering manager and that I would be able to learn from his experience. A lot of things that made him stand out from the other professors in competing academic programs. 

Q: What were some of those things?

A: His level of standards for science, technology and engineering are extraordinary. So even being in the same room talking about how he approaches assessing technology for the future for Mayo Clinic, that will probably be the first time students have ever encountered someone like that. 

It can be challenging at times because he has a high bar that he expects people to rise to. Learning his rigorous approach is important to learn how to assess the potential of future technologies. All of the levels that he's used to operating on, he expects you to get there, while of course understanding that these are students who are still learning and progressing. 

The goal is to close the delta from where you are today to where you could be tomorrow. When he's asking you a question, he's already thinking of the framework and how it should be addressed. It takes time to develop a mental map for your own thoughts. New technologies that we are seeing encountering are accelerating at an exponential rate. 

The University of Minnesota overall is probably the best place to be in the Midwest for biomedical research. I also knew [TLI faculty member] Dr. Dave Nguyen, before enrolling because he was active in the technology and innovation communities. Overall, I had a lot of connection to the place, the people, and the mission of MDI. 

Q: How did you know Dave Nguyen?

A: We’d connected before the pandemic and had a lot of good conversations about technology. We were both interested in where artificial intelligence was headed. He did his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of California, Irvine, and is an all around fascinating guy. He’s also the Principal Investigator for a project I am working on with the UMN Institutional Review Board that requires regulatory approval for further testing and commercialization.

Our convergence in the TLI program and MDI was synergistic and happened by chance. We are at different stages in life and career but were headed to the same destination. You’ll find a lot of those people wandering around the U of M campus, who are doing interesting science and research projects, members of the faculty and administration in some way or another that supports the evolution of technology. Of course it takes a lot of infrastructure to support and everybody that's involved is a kindred spirit.

Q: When you think about the program and the instructors, did you find any surprises in terms of being more on the applied side and less on the academic or theoretical side of the field?

A: There’s a lot of faculty that are thought leaders on a national level or thought leaders in their field and organization. There are great opportunities for students to really fast track their learning because what they're teaching you are things that are interesting to them. 

Many of the faculty hold their terminal graduate degrees plus usually an MBA as well. They're doing a lot of filtering inherently in the curriculum they're presenting to you. A lot of information curation is taking place without even realizing that it's happening. 

If you can tune into what the core idea of their lesson is and see it from their perspective, you are essentially being taught at a doctoral level in some cases. Access to exceptional faculty is really important for the next generation of people that will take on some of those responsibilities at some point in our career. 

Q: I understand that you’ve found the MDI program helpful in the work you do in your day-to-day job as well.

A: Yes, it has been incredibly beneficial. Dr. Rama Prasad, she's part of another member of the faculty, had connected me to engineers she worked with at Analog Devices and I've been working with that engineer on a novel sensor project. 

Through that relationship I have learned about microprocessing chips and global needs finding. If you're really effective at communication and managing technology projects, a company may have you traveling to different parts of the world to understand what their unmet needs are and then connect how sensors or other types of technology infrastructure could be a solution for them. 

There are many examples like that where it wouldn't be possible without being in the program. I wouldn't know Rama, I wouldn't know Jamie, I wouldn't know about Analog. Sometimes a very subtle connection has a butterfly effect and leads to an entirely new and unpredictable experience. 

Q: If someone was considering enrolling in a program like this and wasn't sure if it was the right fit for them, what would you tell them? 

A: I would say that at the rate technology is evolving, the best thing you can do is put yourself in a position that allows you to best take advantage of what your potential might be. People often don't even know their potential because their Bayesian priors are somewhat limited to previous experiences and a concept of themselves that is often not accurate.

During the process of being in the program, you learn more of who you are and not just the idea of yourself. It is important to find your actual potential and how you could benefit an organization or institution. In STEM and engineering programs, applications are up in top research institutions. That means your peers are going to be more competitive in the job market.

I think it’s best to be in a position to either advance your own company or advance your career if you want to stay within a company or be connected into a company that might have more alignment with what your future goals are. Those are all done through people. 

More often than not, if you're showing yourself to be a consistent and productive person, people are more than willing to help not only get you in the right place. That's really hard to do on your own. The bandwidth for larger organizations is limited by their ability to assess hundreds of applications or sometimes thousands. 

If you're going through your director or a professor that has a longstanding history with an organization you want to intern with or potentially work at, you're increasing your likelihood of getting seen. There are no guarantees with anything, but you're drastically improving the likelihood of a positive outcome by going through the process that the world recognizes as accredited knowledge.

There's very few things that you can fully understand through online-only resources like YouTube or even the MITx studying on your own, especially related to medicine and healthcare. There are technical disciplines like coding you can learn that way, but those roles are different from the organizations that engineer medical devices. Candidates need to demonstrate both the intelligence and conscientiousness that is required for something like the MDI program. 

Q: That sounds like an industry that will change rapidly, even while you’re a student.

A: By the time someone finishes any STEM-related program, the landscape is going to change entirely. Learning as much about the fundamentals of, in this case medical devices, is really important to having a tool kit that allows you to determine what the best career trajectory looks like for career and education. 

There's almost no advantage to being outside of the institution, at least for medical devices. When it comes to faculty and research the difference between being in a graduate program and being outside is night and day. 

Q: So when you say that the difference is night and day in these particular programs, I just want to make sure I understand you on that point. What exactly is different? Are there teaching methods that will work with one discipline but not another?

A:  That's a really complex question. The difference between being a software engineer and a medical device engineer is not really comparable. Software engineering in most cases is very low risk. You're writing or manipulating code for an app or program. For a medical device the consequences are generally much higher, especially ones that are invasive to the body. There are FDA regulatory requirements, material science, ISO requirements, HIPAA, CMS reimbursement strategies, and a number of complexities for each area. 

I’m not saying that medical device design is better than software engineering. They're just very different in what is required of the person to do that kind of job. I think it's good that there are different market opportunities for different people.

If we extrapolate your question up further, say, could someone become a doctor of medicine by Wikipedia or some other free sources of information? That's just not how the world is designed. If you want to be doing work at Medtronic or Boston Scientific or Mayo Clinic, those are generally physician and scientist driven organizations that know the benefits of having years of rigorous study. Is credentialism a problem? Yes, it can be but that's for another conversation.  

Q: As both a professional in the medical device industry, and as someone who's going through this master's program now, where do you see medical device innovation going over the next decade or so? 

A: I think the neurological interfaces will eventually replace a lot of the siloed approaches we have now. My focus in the MDI program is in the neurology therapeutic group. Part of the program is that you can self-direct your area study. We currently have cardiology, neurology, and vascular. The human body is one of the ultimate pieces of technology and understanding that is still in its infancy. We didn't even observe vitamin D under a microscope until the last century. So our understanding of how the human body works, especially the brain and consciousness, has barely begun.

In the next decade or so, I think Mayo Clinic has one of the most innovative approaches right now to AI with Platform. I think they may develop the first artificial general intelligence medicine. It’s interesting that AI in healthcare is being driven by an institution that has been around for over 150 years. Nvidia also has a compelling case to lead AGI in medicine, if that’s part of their vision. 

Q: And looking further out than that? 

A: I think the most avant-garde questions are going to be asked in that area about the ethics on the acceptable amount of integration into a biological life form. The very nature of what a human being is and our understanding of consciousness. I am in favor of the Divine design of the species and too much augmentation could have irreversible consequences. 

I think there is a possibility we will see the end of the disease and biological aging within 25 years. After that technology and innovation will be more of a spiritual question. On the University of Minnesota campus the soul of Earl Bakken, the founder of Medtronic, lives on in both the Earl E. Bakken Medical Device Center and the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing. I predict that these centers will merge at some point or an entirely new approach emerges to combine both philosophies.    

I think moral and ethical understanding of the implications of super intelligence is critical to our decision making on technology policy. Minnesota is uniquely positioned geographically with deep roots in Judeo-Christian values that should translate into a world with artificial general intelligence. The Mayo Clinic Digital Hippocratic Oath is a really good example of going above and beyond FDA regulation.There's no FDA requirement that you have to take the Digital Hippocratic Oath, but you should because the field is moving much faster than what regulators and institutions can adapt to. https://www.mayoclinicplatform.org/digital-hippocratic-oath/

The values of the people building the new systems of technology will be expressed in our world. And I hope our alignment with The Benevolent continues as long as possible.