I had been using the device for a little over an hour one afternoon when I heard a voice in my headphones: “You deserve a brain break.” Alcaide says the device can detect when your concentration is starting to wane, a feature that’s meant to facilitate people avoid burnout. “We can tell you when to take a break when we start to detect that your brain is getting tired,” it says. I didn’t feel tired, but I went ahead and took a 10-minute break at the app’s suggestion.
Another day, I racked up 200 points in a day and got a trophy with the message “you’re on fire.” Similar to Fitbit badges that are meant to reward your physical activity, Alcaide says the idea is to encourage people to adopt good habits.
It gave me a little boost, in the same way I feel accomplished when I hit 10,000 steps a day on my Fitbit. I can’t say I’ve changed my work habits much as a result of using the device, but I’m trying to be more mindful of multitasking. Perhaps over time I’d be able to get more nuanced information about my focus habits.
All this information It was fascinating, but I wondered how precise it was. Like most tech companies, Neurable doesn’t share details about how its algorithm works. I turned to W. Hong Yeo, a biomedical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology who develops wearable brainwave-reading devices, for an outside perspective on whether EEG is really sensitive enough to tell me when I’m focused and when I’m not.
“It’s possible, if you can measure EEG signals consistently and reliably,” he told me. Yeo’s current work is trying to measure cognitive decline in older people using EEG.
The challenge in developing portable BCIs compared with invasive ones is lower signal quality, because the electrodes have to record through the skin and skull. And whenever there’s any movement, “you don’t get good skin contact, so your EEG signal might not be captured,” Yeo says.
Because Neurable doesn’t make any health claims, its headset doesn’t have to undergo the same stringent testing as a medical device. Unlike disease detection, which requires a lot more electrodes placed on specific areas of the scalp, measuring focus is more subjective because there’s no gold standard, Yeo says. The company has ambitions to apply its headset as a medical device to monitor brain health and diagnose neurological conditions, but for now it’s starting with consumer applications.
Still, brainwave data is highly personal, and devices like Neurable’s raise the issue of storing and protecting user data. Molnar explains that the headset converts raw EEG data into focus information, anonymizes it, deletes the raw data on the device, and sends it to the app. This focus data is encrypted, sent to Neurable’s cloud, and stored in a database. Personal user information, such as name, email address, and password, is encrypted and saved in a separate database.