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Sana Health: Delivering True Pain Relief and Restoring Restful Sleep

CIO VendorRichard Hanbury, Founder and CEO
The founder and CEO of Sana Health—Richard Hanbury—had a life changing motor accident in Yemen in 1972. He was clinically dead for eight minutes and given a five year life expectancy due to his extensive injuries and excruciating pain. Richard decided he had two choices, when his dose of opioids crept up and proved ineffective in controlling his pain. “I had a choice of either continuing to take more and more pills until I died, or invent a solution to my pain,” says Richard.

Richard was only 19 years old when he made his life altering decision, and he set about inventing a light and sound-emitting device that stimulates specific patterns in the brain to help users enter a ‘flow state.’ In this state, the electrical impulses in each half (hemisphere) of the brain work in balance, which promotes highly effective pain relief and restores restful sleep.

Sana Relief, as the wearable product is marketed today, measures heart-rate variability to gauge the user’s nervous system state and tailor audio and visual triggers in a sequenced pattern. “One in three adults in the U.S. doesn’t get enough sleep, and 100 million Americans are in pain.

Drug free alternative to opioids for giving people choice and control in managing their pain


Sufferers turn to different medications, which have many adverse events from mood and memory impairment to severe addiction. A number of tech companies have begun trying to reduce insomnia and treat pain in recent years, but none of them really work,” says Richard. “We strive to provide each and every individual with complete relief, ensuring they live their life to the fullest and achieve freedom from pain and insomnia. We provide a therapy that has the potential to reduce opioid consumption by up to 30 percent and restore healthy, restful sleep,” he adds. Developed on the basis of 24 years of experience and more than 1300 individual trials of EEG-based research, Sana Relief is now in full scale clinical development at multiple clinical centers including Mount Sinai Hospital. Sana Relief has applications for insomnia, chronic pain, sports recovery and cognitive enhancement. SANA has been used successfully by the Virgin Challenger team, US Marines, and British SAS for cognitive performance enhancement.

SANA is about to commence FDA dialogue and review, and promises to be the world’s first truly smart device for pain relief and sleep. “Full scale clinical trials for the product are scheduled for late 2018. Our target is to get devices ready for public sale by 2019/20. More than 72,000 people died from opioids in the US in the last year alone, clearly giving people the choice of non-drug alternatives that would be of huge benefit. We are aiming to do this,” says Richard.