# Orbit Technologies

Non-invasive vestibular modulation

- Team: Steven Pang (co-founder), Colton El-Habr (CTO)
- Founded: 2023
- Invested: 2024
- Links: [Website](https://www.orbit.engineering/), [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-pang-625004218/)
- Field: The body and the brain

## The problem: Can a small current behind the ears make you feel like you're moving?

### How balance works

Tucked inside each inner ear is the vestibular system, a motion sensor in two parts. Three semicircular canals report rotation. Two otolith organs report straight-line acceleration and tilt. Their signals travel along the vestibular nerve to the brainstem, and fan out from there to many other parts of the brain.

The canals are loops full of fluid, called endolymph. Turn your head and the fluid lags behind, the way coffee stays put when you spin the cup. The lag pushes on a gel cap, the cupula, and bends the hair cells inside it, which turn the bend into nerve signals. The otolith organs pull the same trick with a weighted membrane that sags when you tilt. To them, gravity and acceleration feel alike, so the brain has to work out which is which.

Galvanic vestibular stimulation, or GVS, skips the moving part. Electrodes sit on the mastoids, the bony bumps behind your ears, and pass a small current from one side to the other. The nerve fires faster on the cathode side and slower on the anode side. Stand up and you sway toward the anode. Sit down and you feel a gentle roll.

### Why it is hard

**One direction, mostly.** The standard two-electrode setup gives you essentially one motion: roll, with a bit of yaw. Tipping forward and back needs other electrode layouts, and those responses are weaker. In one study they produced noticeable motion in only about half the participants.

**The skin is in the way.** The current has to cross the skin to reach the nerve, and people feel it. Side effects include tingling under the electrodes, a metallic taste and flashes in the visual field. Researchers turn the current up step by step until it gets uncomfortable. Everything useful happens between the smallest current that produces motion and the largest one a person will put up with.

**Every head is different.** People vary a lot in how they respond, though each person is consistent with themselves from one trial to the next. A feeling of motion is hard to measure from the outside, which may explain some of the spread. Researchers suggest tuning stimulation to each person's own thresholds.

**The eyes have to agree.** If your balance sense says you're moving and your eyes say you aren't, the mismatch can make you sick. Virtual reality already has this problem. Researchers are studying whether stimulation timed to what you see could ease that conflict instead of adding to it.

### What Orbit Technologies is after

Orbit is building a device you wear behind the ears that sends electrical signals to the vestibular system. The first job is to make you feel movement that isn't happening, so that games and video feel more like being there.

The longer hope is to go from gaming to treating neurological disease, and sleep is one target. Vestibular pathways connect to the parts of the brain that regulate sleep and waking, and there is evidence that rocking helps people sleep. That's part of why researchers are testing whether electrical stimulation can do something similar.

### How they go at it

**Forge the signal.** The device sends electrical signals that mimic the patterns the brain would normally get during movement, in the hope that the brain takes them at face value.

**Use a door that's already there.** To Orbit, the vestibular system is one of the brain's existing "high-level APIs", and one of the most accessible. The bet is to use an input channel that's already understood, now, rather than wait for a complete model of the brain.

**Let the product pay for the science.** Detailed models of the brain need far more data than academic labs can gather. A consumer product people actually want could create the market that pays for collecting it.

**More current, safely.** Orbit's recent work includes non-invasive electrodes that can deliver more current at a safe level, along with work on modulating sleep. We couldn't find any sleep results it has published.

### Still open

Does it actually help sleep? A recent meta-analysis pooled three sham-controlled trials, 289 adults with insomnia between them, and found a statistically significant drop in insomnia severity. The authors still call the approach experimental. There are few trials, the outcomes are mostly self-reported, the results don't all agree and there's little safety data. The evidence is better for physical rocking than for electrical stimulation.

What is the current actually stimulating? Early animal work suggested GVS acts on the nerve fibres directly and bypasses the hair cells. Later studies suggest the hair cells may be joining in after all.

### Words used here

- **vestibular system**: The inner-ear organs that sense head rotation, acceleration and tilt.
- **semicircular canals**: Three fluid-filled loops in each inner ear that detect rotation of the head.
- **otolith organs**: Two inner-ear sensors, the utricle and saccule, that detect straight-line acceleration and tilt relative to gravity.
- **endolymph**: The fluid inside the canals whose lag during head turns is what the sensors detect.
- **hair cells**: Sensory cells whose tiny bristles turn a mechanical bend into an electrical nerve signal.
- **Galvanic vestibular stimulation**: Passing a small current between electrodes behind the ears to change vestibular nerve activity.
- **sham-controlled**: Describing a trial in which a comparison group gets a fake version of the treatment, so the real effect can be separated from placebo.

## About Orbit Technologies

Orbit Technologies is pioneering non-invasive vestibular modulation—using carefully tuned electrical signals behind the ear to interface directly with the brain's vestibular system. The technology creates hyper-immersive sensations of movement that the brain interprets as real, without any implant or invasive procedure.

The company is running clinical trials focused on sleep improvement, with early research showing subjects may achieve full rest in 6.5 hours instead of 8. The longer-term vision is a consumer wellness device that improves sleep quality at scale.

## Sources

1. [Vestibular system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibular_system), Wikipedia
2. [Semicircular canals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicircular_canals), Wikipedia
3. [A wide-ranging review of galvanic vestibular stimulation: from its genesis to basic science and clinical applications](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12034599/), Experimental Brain Research
4. [Motion sensations, postural sway, and side effects for copolar galvanic vestibular stimulation](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12950039/), Experimental Brain Research
5. [Electrical vestibular nerve stimulation as a novel therapeutic approach for insomnia: a systematic review and meta-analysis](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13032400/), BMC Psychiatry
6. [A Georgetown student's startup nabbed $500K for immersive neurostimulation tech](https://technical.ly/startups/orbit-technologies-georgetown-bark-tank/), Technical.ly
7. [How former Hopkins student Colton El-Habr and Orbit make magic with vestibular stimulators](https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2025/04/how-former-hopkins-student-colton-el-habr-and-orbit-make-magic-with-vestibular-stimulators), The Johns Hopkins News-Letter
8. [VIEWPOINT: Transform Ambitions into Reality](https://thehoya.com/opinion/viewpoint-transform-ambitions-into-reality/), The Hoya