Peter Ford | Founder & Director
Control Bionics

Peter Shann Ford became the first Australian news anchor at CNN in Atlanta in 1981. He began writing code in his spare time, developing alternate systems for controlling a computer without a keyboard, leading to the Veterans Administration Rehabilitation R&D Laboratory in Atlanta hiring him as a programmer/analyst while still at CNN. For the next three years at CNN, he also worked at the VA R&D lab developing methods for severely disabled veterans to control computers without needing a keyboard. He continued developing alternative communication programs as a consultant while becoming a news anchor with the NBC station in Miami, Florida, then with the NBC channel in Washington DC. Returning to Australia, he invented a system for using neuroelectric signals inside a muscle to control a computer. He received a million dollar investment from Lindsay Phillip’s Phoenix Development Fund to form Control Bionics, with a mission to commercially develop neuromuscular controls to create text and computer-generated voice communications for people with severe disabilities. Peter harnessed this technology to design an application to enable victims of domestic violence to automatically call for help if endangered. The company’s R&D team is also designing applications to warn of conditions in which an aggressor and a victim may be about to experience violence, and create alerts to prevent it before it occurs. This year Control Bionics is launching NeuroStrip, a powerful BandAid-sized wearable, wireless, physiological sensor with a variety of new applications, including a novel design design aimed at reducing incidents of domestic violence in Australia, and ultimately globally.