Untacked

20 ja n ua r y/ f e b r ua r y 2 015 U n tac k e d Anna Jaffe is what you'd call an over- achiever. in 2006, while still in school at the massachusetts institute of technology, she co-founded the Vehicle design sum- mit, a global team dedicated to developing hyper-efficient vehicles, and in 2013 she founded her own technological startup, mobi. And this fall, Jaffe rode Jane Karol's moonshine to the fourth level adult ama- teur freestyle championship at the u.s. dressage finals in lexington, Ky. Yet Jaffe, 29, does occasionally some- how find free time, and in it she looks for ways to apply her technological training to her equestrian hobby. Karol and moon- shine, a 13-year-old westphalian gelding, have stepped right up to help at Karol's Bear spot farm and foundation in Con- cord, mass. "we're just starting research to watch peoples' brains while they're riding," Jaffe said. "[electroencephalography] machines are usually used for testing while people are sleeping or sitting in front of a computer, and they tell you things like, 'don't blink!' "we want to put it on people when they ride, so the helmet has to be able to jostle the eeg, and the people are going to blink," Jaffe continued. "it took us a long time to make a prototype that sort of worked. in that process, we were trying all sorts of things." one of those was the sticky electrodes most commonly used for electrocardio- grams. "ey didn't really work on the people, but then i stuck them on moonshine's head, and they worked perfectly," said Jaffe. "he was our first research horse to try an eeg, and we're just starting that project now." on her first day of work with the geld- ing, Jaffe performed 15 "tiny tests." ese included measuring his brain function while standing in a stall, resting, and then standing in the crossties. "en i'd peek around the corner and see if his brain patterns changed when i walked past him versus when someone else, a stranger, did," Jaffe said. "ere's a pretty distinct difference. "ere are all kinds of things we want to play with," she continued. "i think the primary goal is trying to find the neuro- logical signature for pain in horses. A lot of times you can't find a clear unsoundness, but you can say the horse doesn't feel right. we don't know how much detail we'll be able to find—if you can find the difference between soft tissue and hard tissue pain, or the difference between chronic and acute pain." Jaffe is planning to use the eeg machine on riders to measure the differ- ences riding creates in the brain. Karol is also a psychologist who combines tradi- tional therapy with equine-assisted therapy at Bear spot. "i'm interested in lasting changes in the brain," she said. "we want to see if we can find the neurological signature for change. i think it'd be kind of cool to quantify what's going on, so that's prob- ably the long-term goal with that proj- ect." tEcH spotLigHt This Is Your Brain, On Horses PHoTo CourTeSy of anna jaffe Jane Karol tests an EEG designed by Electrical Geodesics Inc., one of Anna Jaffe's methods of measuring brain activity while riding. One amateur dressage rider is setting out to measure the neurological impact riding has on humans, but she's also learning what impact we have on our horses' brains as well. By lisA sl A de

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