NEW YORK — Richard Hanbury and a schoolmate were traversing Yemen in a Jeep when a car pulled out from behind a petrol truck and sped toward them on a narrow bridge. The truck blocked Hanbury’s ability to swerve laterally out of harm’s way. He faced a split-second decision: either veer off the bridge or collide head-on with the car.
“I figured we were dead either way,” Hanbury recalled. “Then in that split second I had an image of my dad wandering around the country looking for my remains to find. I was like, if we go off the bridge, we’re dead anyway, but at least if we go off the bridge, he’ll have something to find.”
He veered off the bridge. The pair survived the crash, but barely. Hanbury suffered debilitating injuries including a T10 vertebra fracture, an aortic tear and such excruciating nerve-damage pain that doctors gave him only five years to live.
While bedridden, however, Hanbury had an epiphany that drew on some implausible Hollywood inspiration to create a light- and sound-emitting device that stimulates specific patterns in the brain to help users enter this so-called flow state, a temporal period of focus in which pain subsides and the wearer can feel relaxed enough to sleep. The smart sleep mask measures heart-rate variability to track the user’s nervous system and then tailors its audio and visual triggers in a patent-pending sequence of patterns.
This wearable device — marketed by the company Hanbury founded and now runs as CEO, Sana Health — looks like a stripped-down virtual reality headset. Sana won two awards at Tuesday night’s TPG Sports Group-organized, fourth annual Sports Tank competition for sports technology startups, claiming both the Under Armour Innovation Award and the Martin Group’s Most Buzzworthy Award. (Sana is the Yemeni capital city not too far from the site of Hanbury’s accident and also the Latin word for “healthy” that appeared in the motto for the revival of the Modern Olympics, “Mens sana in corpore sano,” or “A sound mind in a sound body.”)
“Just the story and the whole way he went about it and the thesis behind it — all of the studying and data behind it — is phenomenal,” said former NBA All-Star Baron Davis, now a tech investor who sat on Sports Tank’s advisory panel.
Sana has applications for insomnia, chronic pain and sports recovery. Hanbury is using sports “to spread our message,” he said, even though he acknowledges that it is not strictly a sports company. The product has been developed in conjunction with military and medical researchers, including the Stanford Sleep Labs, and is undergoing the rigorous FDA clearance process to prove its efficacy before coming to market.
Christine Denham, the Martin Group’s senior public relations manager who helped choose the award recipient, said the combination of Hanbury’s story, his product and his research made Sana the clear choice.
“There’s not really anything more compelling than that,” she said. “It’s a perfect solution to a problem that he physically had.”
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Hanbury, just 19 at the time of his accident on Jan. 23, 1992, was an Arabic student at Durham University seeking to hone his language skills while enjoying some traveling. The accident left him with a paraplegic and in excruciating pain. Now 45, he uses a wheelchair and has been free from pain for the past 25 years. His journey to that point defies belief.
He would spend 14 months in a hospital, the first three and a half days of which while still in Yemen. Given the facility’s dilapidated conditions — he said a dead body was left in his room for two days — he adds a caveat: “Calling that a hospital is really a stretch.”
There was no food or water, so his friend, Christian Schneider-Sickert, walked to and from the village to fetch the essentials for Hanbury despite his own injuries: a cracked thigh bone, an arm broken in three places and a broken collarbone. Hanbury’s insurance company wouldn’t send a plane to retrieve him without a faxed doctor’s note. Not only was there no fax machine for 100 miles, but there was no doctor, either. Only Schneider-Sickert’s threats of litigation to the insurance firm— and promise to pay for the private plane should it not have been truly necessary — prompted action.
“Without him,” Hanbury said, “there’s no way I would have even made it to the U.K.”
The second life-saving act came from a more unexpected source. While laying in a hospital bed some time later, Hanbury was watching the 1991 Bruce Willis movie Hudson Hawk, a song-filled action comedy that has been likened to “a neo-Rat Pack musical.” The film included several “really funny fast-paced set pieces where they’re burglarizing museums singing songs,” Hanbury said. While immersed in that, he received a reprieve from his pain.
“That was good enough to really get me in a flow state,” he said. “Between [songs], I was dropping out because” — he paused and continued in deadpan — “dialogue and script.”
A flow state was a concept popularized by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his 1990 book, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.” Whether it’s a musician performing, a mathematician problem-solving or anyone engrossed in entertainment, there’s a focused brain state that suspends all matters beyond concentration.
This prompted Hanbury’s work to recreate the experience with what would become the Sana mask. By summer of 1993, he was beginning to reap real benefits even while not wearing the headset.
“Once the device started giving me pain-free time after using it, it then took three months from that day until I had my first 24-hour period without nerve-damage pain,” he said of Oct. 30, 1993. “Basically, I haven’t had a minute of nerve-damage pain ever since.”
Periodically, a few-second twinge reminds him of what once seemed a permanent companion. Six months passed before he felt confident the pain would not return.
“Bruce Willis did save my life,” Hanbury added. “I’m not sure he’d like how I characterize his film, but he literally saved my life.”
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Before Durham, Hanbury attended prestigious Eton College for secondary school where he was fortunate to fall under the tutelage of a biology teacher named Bob Stephenson, a Ph.D. scientist who was a world expert in neurobiology and memory. As Hanbury recalled, Stephenson essentially told the class that plants were boring, so he focused his instruction on the nervous system and the brain — “two years of my life being taught by a total genius,” Hanbury said — that gave him some foundation for his later scientific research. He later earned his MBA from Wharton and served as a McKinsey consultant, among other jobs, while working on the Sana device as well.
Hanbury first connected with the U.K. military who saw the benefits to performance through improved focus. They funded the first segment of research, he said, with Richard Branson hot-air balloon expeditions and Formula 1 contributing later. There have been more than 700 trials of EEG-based research.
Among the testimonials: a slide on the Sports Tank stage quoted F1 driver David Coulthard as saying, “After one week with Sana, I won the UK Grand Prix. It was the best drive of my life.” When Solar Impulse pilot Bertrand Piccard flew around the world in a fully solar-powered plane, he needed to check controls every 20 minutes, so he used the Sana sleep device to maximize his restfulness for those short increments in between.
After Sana received media exposure in a news story last spring, Hanbury began fielding requests from parties interested in trials. The most persistent was the NHL’s San Jose Sharks’ head athletic trainer, Ray Tufts, who kept pinging Hanbury over email: “Ready yet?” When conducting a short demonstration with six players recently, Hanbury said two fell asleep within 15 minutes, and the other four reported a feeling of relaxation. The Sharks then commissioned a further study to help combat travel fatigue and ice hockey’s typical wear and tear.
“What struck me with him was — not just on a job level but on a human level — he really cares about his players,” Hanbury said of Tufts. “And he really wants them to be doing the healthiest thing they can be doing, which is why he was contacting me.”
While on stage at Sports Tank, Hanbury recognized a shift in the investors’ question, noting a particular tone of voice when people begin negotiating — skepticism-tinged inquiries trying to hide underlying interest.
Hanbury recalled an earlier pitch meeting with a potential investor who put on the device, felt its immediate effect and was intent on getting a good deal, no matter the circumstance.
“He didn’t take it off,” Hanbury said, before adding with a chuckle: “He was asking questions while yawning and struggling to stay awake and saying, ‘How do you know it works?’”