An elaborate haute couture headdress was the inspiration for new wearable safety gear that can predict fatigue and save lives for astronauts and miners in high-heat and high-pressure environments.

The Canaria earpiece is the brainchild of startup entrepreneur Alex Moss, (25), of Brisbane, whose idea took off when she won a global technology award from NASA, in 2016. She had 48 hours to build a proof of concept. A year later she took out the 2017 Richard Branson Worldwide Top 10 Technology Startups Extreme Tech Challenge, the first in a string of international achievements.

Now a resident of Queensland, British-born Alex has a background in fine art and design. A graduate of the famous Courtauld Institute of Art in London, she is a successful model and creative director who has developed advertising campaigns appearing in Italian Vogue. Alex is entirely self-taught in technology. Her personal journey to the leading edge, at the age of 25, is nothing short of amazing.

“I have no formal training. I was not ‘meant’ to do what I am doing now. I was never ‘supposed’ to found a successful technology company bridging AI, aerospace and medical device engineering. My family and peers were so profoundly shocked when I won the NASA Global Award that many thought the media coverage of my accolade was a joke; some sort of ironic performance art piece I was doing which accidentally fell into being picked up by the press,” she said.

Alex is founding CEO & Head Designer of Canaria Technologies and is commercialising the Canaria earpiece, a real-time medical-grade wearable device, powered by machine learning, which can predict cognitive fatigue and heat stress. The business has raised significant seed capital and some of Queensland’s biggest mining and oil and gas companies have seen the prototype and already put in orders.

Alex won the WiT Entrepreneurial Start Up Award in 2018.

Feature article written by Hannah Davies, published in Brisbane News Magazine (issue 1205) in 2018.