Impairment Science · Chief Executive
Robert Schiller
He runs a company that asks a quiet, radical question: not what is in your blood, but how is your brain doing right now?
He runs a company that asks a quiet, radical question: not what is in your blood, but how is your brain doing right now?
Open DRUID and it hands you four small games. Tap when the shapes match. Hold a line. Keep the count. Two and a half minutes later it hands back a number - a readiness score that says, in plain math, whether your brain and body are operating the way they normally do. Robert Schiller is the CEO of the company behind that number, Impairment Science, Inc., headquartered on Cambridge Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What he sells is not a gadget so much as a switch in thinking. For a century, the question on a factory floor or a loading dock was chemical: what is in this person's system? Schiller's company flips the camera around. The interesting question, DRUID argues, is performance - is this person sharp enough, steady enough, awake enough to do the job in front of them safely. A breathalyzer can tell you about last night. A reaction-time test tells you about this minute.
That distinction is the whole business, and Schiller talks about it the way a baseball executive talks about on-base percentage. He has compared impairment detection to Moneyball: stop trusting the gut, start trusting the measurement. It is a tidy frame for a company whose product is, at bottom, a way of turning a fuzzy human judgment - "you look fine to me" - into something you can chart.
A new window into your workforce's readiness for duty.
DRUID runs on the phone already in your pocket. No needles, no lab, no waiting for results. In under three minutes it measures the parts of you that slip first when you are tired, drunk, or otherwise not yourself.
Reaction time. How fast you respond when the screen calls for it.
Decision accuracy. Whether you can tell the right tap from the wrong one under a clock.
Hand-eye and balance. The coordination and steadiness that fade before you notice.
Time estimation and divided attention. Holding two things at once - the first skill to wobble.
Add the four together and DRUID returns a single score. Do it on a clear-headed morning and you have your personal baseline. Do it again before a shift and the gap between the two is the whole point. It is impairment from any cause - fatigue, alcohol, cannabis - read off performance rather than chemistry.
Schiller's training says courtroom; his career says startup. He earned a BA from Columbia University and a JD from Boston College Law School, then spent the working decades not practicing law but running high-tech companies - and twice walking them all the way to an IPO. Taking a company public is the kind of thing founders describe in war stories. He has done it twice, which tends to change how a person reads a balance sheet.
Before Impairment Science he served as Executive Chair at Brightbox Inc., a B2B kiosk-technology outfit. The through-line across his resume is less about any single industry and more about a job description: take an early, science-or-engineering-heavy idea and figure out how to turn it into a company people pay for.
Leads the Cambridge company commercializing DRUID across consumer and enterprise markets.
B2B kiosk technology solutions - one more startup in a long ledger of them.
BA from Columbia University; JD from Boston College Law School.
Brought two high-tech startups to the public markets over his career.
The concept came from Dr. Michael Milburn, a psychology professor who built DRUID's first version and now serves as Chief Science Officer. The company put the app through the wringer most apps never see: an NIH SBIR grant funded validation research with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and a separate study with Massachusetts State Troopers tested it against alcohol. Schiller's role is the translation layer - turning peer-review credibility into something a fleet manager or safety director can actually deploy.
That credibility is the moat. Plenty of products claim to spot impairment. Few can point to validation studies with names like Johns Hopkins attached.
Schiller's ambition is not to sell a clever app. It is to make performance-based testing a normal part of how safety-critical workplaces operate - the way a hard hat or a seatbelt is normal. Druid Enterprise is that bet made concrete: dashboards, score tracking, and analytics that let an organization watch readiness across a whole roster instead of guessing person by person. The partnership with workplace-testing veteran AlcoPro is the same idea - meeting employers where their safety programs already live.
The 2026 research hints at the longer game. If a phone can tell not just whether someone is impaired but what is behind it - separating the haze of cannabis from the slur of alcohol - then a single number starts to carry a lot more signal. Schiller is building toward a world where "are you good to go?" stops being a hunch and becomes a measurement anyone can take, anywhere, in three minutes flat.