The Melon headband quantifies the brain’s focus during any activity of your choosing to better understand your working habits. Together with its proprietary mobile app, Melon gives insight into the brain’s response to various stimuli: action, environments, emotions, or whatever behavior you decide to measure, and visually records the data. This makes it extremely easy to understand productivity flaws and how to correct them. The device can be worn when coding, studying, weightlifting, writing, or whatever you choose.
Melon comes in black or white.
Does your focus skyrocket while listening to ambient music but dips when coding? Try combining the two and measure the new effect on focus levels.
EEG and the human brain
Each human brain consists of billions of interconnected neurons that discharge a faint electrical signal whenever active. The resulting aggregated electrical activity, brainwaves, is measured on the forehead with electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that’s been used in the medical industry for decades. Melon compresses this technology into a head band that’s wireless and portable. Rather than covering the entire scalp, Melon places only three electrodes on the forehead region with the primary electrode placed on the FP1 area to allow pre-frontal cortex brainwave monitoring.
Melon’s thoughtful suggestions
Using EEG, Melon detects brain waves and compiles a focus level calculation using specific algorithms supplied by NeuroSky, a leader in consumer EEG technology. The data is fed into the Melon mobile app to display personalized results along with optional feedback on how improve. If your concentration is slipping, Melon’s app may suggest taking five deep breaths or listening to a specific genre of music proven to boost focus in the past.
The Melon app’s interface makes it easy to select an action and initiate a session using input tags. At the end of every tracking session, the app provides both a numerical score associated with the action along with the option of storing the data as trends to forecast periods of time. Melon’s ultimate goal is to simplify the notion of self-awareness and introspection.
An open invitation for DIY
As part of the effort to engage the public and evoke creative uses for the Melon, a hardware hacking guide along with the software development kit for both iOS and Android apps is made freely available to the public; this includes the focus data, raw EEG data, and list of algorithms for different mental states.
Know yourself to empower yourself
The first step in fixing a problem is identifying that problem. Why settle for being inadequate at certain things when you can empower yourself to become a better person? Melon makes it possibly to identify your best working conditions to emulate them.
Visit Melon’s Kickstarter page to learn more or support the project.
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