Boost and Monitor Brain Fitness or Control Things Wirelessly With Your Mind

Harness the power of your brain with the Emotive Insight, a five-channel wireless, wearable brain computer-interface — a headband that tracks cognitive performance and recognizes movement commands. The device uses specialized detection software to track cognitive performance and measures the user’s attention, focus, engagement, interest, excitement, affinity, and relaxation. The data is graphically plotted and interpreted, enabling the user to establish a productivity profile that’s individually tailored on a bio-rhythmic level.

  
The Emotiv Insight is comfortable and can even be worn to sleep

Users can use this data to gain a deeper insight into what time of day that they’re most focused, and duration of that focus. Learn how deeply you relax and what outside factors stimulated your stress levels. Emotive provides you with the tools to monitor performance and become more self-aware, thereby working smarter and ultimately saving time. Emotive Insight’s Kickstarter campaign is well underway at the time of writing this, having blown past its proposed goal within the first day alone.

Easy on, easy off
The Emotive Insight can be worn at any time and with any activity because it doesn’t require any conductive gel to function. Just plot the device on your head and data is wirelessly sent via Bluetooth 4 to a designated mobile device. There’s no intrusiveness whatsoever, and it’s completely safe for people of all ages and medical conditions. The sleek and comfortable design allows it to even be worn to sleep.

This is how it works
Measuring brainwaves is nothing new; medical devices and similar headbands have used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the faint electrical signals discharged by active neurons for years – the technology has been around in some shape or form since the early part of the twentieth-century. With that said, one must wonder what’s the point in reinventing wheel?

Unlike other brain-interfaces on the market, Emotiv Insight is the only device to include five EEG sensors and two reference sensors built-in, allowing coverage of the frontal cortex (executive functions), parietal-temporal (auditory, spatial/co-ordination), and occipital (visual). For example, another cognitive tracker Kickstarter success story, the Melon, places three electrodes on the pre-frontal cortex alone.

Controlling stuff
The Emotive Insight can interpret basic mental commands such as forward, push, pull, levitate, rotate, and even disappear, as well as discern facial expressions including blinks, winks, frowns, shock and smiles. Mapping a command to a specific control scheme is a matter of visualizing in your mind that command while recording the specific control. For example, visualizing “forward” every time you drive a remote control car forward will teach the headband to issue a forward drive command to the toy car anytime you form this thought (assuming the car has a Bluetooth 4 receiver). The headband works as an intermediary.

Developer friendly
The odds of a Bluetooth 4 receiver being built into an RC car are very slim. To counter the lack of integrated applications, the designers are releasing Emotive Insight’s API and SDK for developers and researchers who wish to take advantage of Emotive Insight’s full capabilities. A gyroscopic mouse and full head motion detection is linked to control outputs for application development. The technology is applicable to a diverse range industry such as: hands-free control system, smart adaptive environments, art, accessibility design, market research, psychology, medicine, robotics, automotive, transport safety, defense, security, gaming, and computing.

Visit Emotiv Insight's Kickstarter to follow the campaign