“It’s time to give your brain a break,” a voice said through the headset after I’d been using the device for just over an hour one afternoon. Alkaideh says the device can detect when your concentration starts to wane, a feature meant to help people avoid burnout. “If your brain detects that you’re starting to get tired, it can let you know when it’s time to take a break,” he says. Even though I wasn’t feeling tired, I followed the app’s suggestion and took a 10-minute break.
On another day, they collected 200 points in a single day and won a trophy with the message, “You are healthy.” Like Fitbit badges, which are designed to reward physical activity, Alkaideh says the aim is to nudge people into good habits.
The device gave me a little boost, similar to the sense of accomplishment I get when I hit 10,000 steps a day with my Fitbit. I can’t say that using the device has drastically changed my work habits, but it has made me more mindful about multitasking. Perhaps over a longer period of time, it has given me more detailed information about my concentration habits.
All this information The results were intriguing, but I wondered how accurate they were. Like most tech companies, Neurable doesn’t share details about how its algorithms work. I asked W. Hong Yeo, a biomedical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is developing a wearable brainwave-reading device, for an outside perspective on whether EEG is really sensitive enough to know when I’m concentrating and when I’m not.
“As long as you can measure the EEG signal consistently and reliably, that’s possible,” he told me. Yeo’s current research involves using EEG to measure cognitive decline in older adults.
The challenge in developing a wearable BCI is that compared with invasive BCIs, the signal quality is lower because electrodes must record through the skin or skull, and when there’s movement, “you might not get the EEG signal captured because you don’t make good contact with the skin,” Yeo said.
Neurable isn’t making any health claims, so its headsets don’t have to be tested as rigorously as medical devices. Unlike disease detection, which requires placing lots of electrodes in specific places on the scalp, measuring focus is more subjective because there’s no gold standard, Yeo said. The company aims to use the headset as a medical device to monitor brain health and diagnose neurological disorders, but for now it’s starting with consumer applications.
Still, EEG data is very personal information, and a device like Neurable raises questions about how user data is stored and protected. Molnar explains that the headset converts raw EEG data into focus information, anonymizes it, and then deletes the raw data on the device and sends it to the app. That focus data is encrypted and uploaded to Neurable’s cloud, where it’s stored in a database. Users’ personal information, such as their name, email address, and password, is encrypted and stored in a separate database.
