Laboratory and clinical
Gloved hands holding a sample or a needle. Recording an observation, advancing a slide, or pulling up the protocol without breaking sterility or breaking attention.
Use cases
If it has a receiver, it's in range.
One band, one runtime. The list below is not a roadmap of integrations. It is a list of things that already accept input, and therefore already work.
Where it matters most
For people whose hands don't get a vote.
Around 5% of the world's population lives with a motor impairment that makes a keyboard an obstacle rather than a tool. The accessibility market did not ask for a brain interface; it asked for a way to use the same software as everyone else. That is the case Lumina is designed to satisfy first.
ALS, MS, spinal injury
Where speech may go or already has, subvocal muscle activity often persists. A band that reads residual signal keeps a person in their own documents and their own accounts.
RSI and chronic strain
Not a moral victory, a practical one. When typing is the injury, the alternative has to be fast enough that the work still gets done.
Temporary incapacity
A cast, a sling, post-surgical recovery. Weeks where the tool you relied on is suddenly unavailable, and no one is going to relearn their workflow around it.
Removing the assistive look
Head pointers and sip-and-puff switches are visible and slow. A band on the forearm is neither, and that difference matters to how people are treated in a room.
The moment your hands are committed, your software stops.
These are environments where the interface has to move away from the person, not the other way around. Every one of them is loud, dirty, or occupied, which is exactly what subvocal input is for.
Industrial and field
A technician on a ladder with both hands on a panel. Diagnostics, torque specs, and work-order logging, retrieved and written without climbing back down.
Music and live production
Both hands on an instrument or a console. Transport, cue, and camera switching stay available at the exact moment both hands are occupied.
Surgery and procedure rooms
Imaging, notes, and reference material moved without turning away from a sterile field or asking someone else to drive the workstation.
Manufacturing and assembly
Torque values, part numbers, and step confirmations delivered exactly where the work is happening, instead of behind the operator at a terminal.
Vehicles and machinery
A cabin full of screens and controls. Navigation, radio, and climate handled without a hand leaving the wheel or the stick.
The boring uses are the ones that stick.
A second saved forty times an hour is not a demo. It is the reason a device ends up staying on your wrist.
Assistants, without the theatre
No wake word, no waiting for a listening indicator, no apology to the people around you. The prompt is composed and submitted while you keep looking at the thing you were already looking at.
Mail and messages
Triage, reply, file, archive. The standing tax of written communication, paid without moving between a document and an inbox.
Editing and code review
Navigate symbols, jump to a definition, run the test, leave the comment. Actions that cost a keyboard round-trip each and happen hundreds of times a day.
Research and reading
Search, capture, quote, annotate. The reading stays continuous while the mechanical parts of research happen underneath it.
What it deliberately cannot do
Lumina does not read your thoughts in the sense that word usually travels. It reads muscle activity associated with subvocalised speech: you have to form the words, deliberately, the way you form them when you decide to speak. There is no passive mind-reading mode, and the previous sentence is a design commitment, not a limitation to be patched out later.
What requires confirmation
Anything financial, permanent, or visible to another person: purchases, sends, deletes, unlocks, anything that cannot be walked back. The action sequence is shown first and executes only on a deliberate confirmation.
Radios, not hubs.
The band transmits on the bands these devices already use. No gateway, no account linkage, no dependence on a vendor's servers staying up.
| Class | Control | Transport | Mean latency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lighting | On/off, dimming, scenes, colour groups | Sub-GHz · BLE | 80 ms |
| Power & sockets | Switched mains, load reporting | Sub-GHz | 90 ms |
| Climate | Thermostats, fans, air handling | Sub-GHz · BLE | 110 ms |
| Window & shading | Motorised blinds, shutters, skylights | Sub-GHz | 120 ms |
| Access | Door strikes, gates, garage openers | Sub-GHz | 95 ms |
| Media | Receivers, speakers, TVs, HDMI switching | BLE · IR bridge | 130 ms |
| Sensing | Motion, contact, temperature, humidity readout | Sub-GHz | 60 ms |
In the enclosure
Every radio it might need sits a few millimetres away.
The band talks to devices the way a remote does, on the frequencies they already listen on. Nothing in your home needs to be paired to an account, or to a company that might stop existing.
Four days in the life.
The room wakes up first
"Lights to warm, kettle on, read me the overnight." Three receivers, one utterance, no phone touched. The coffee is ready before the sentence finishes resolving.
Both hands in the panel
Diagnostics pulled, torque spec confirmed, work order stamped, all while standing on a ladder with nothing free to type with. The laptop stays closed in the bag.
Ninety minutes without leaving the document
Research, quotes, citation capture, three assistant prompts. Not once does the cursor leave the paragraph being written, and not once does the sentence get typed twice.
One thought to close the day
Doors locked, lights out, focus mode off, playback stopped. Four systems, one sentence, every command confirmed by the HUD line before it executed.
Tell us the case we haven't listed.
The useful edge cases usually come from someone doing work we have never seen.