One afternoon I was wearing the device for just over an hour when I heard a voice in the earpiece: “You’ve earned a brain break.” Alcaide says the device can detect when your concentration is starting to wane, and that this feature is meant to help people avoid burnout. “We can tell you when to take a break once we start to detect that your brain is getting fatigued,” he says. I didn’t feel fatigued, but I went ahead and took a 10-minute break following the app’s suggestion.
Another day, I collected 200 points in one day and won a trophy with a message that said “you’re on fire.” Similar to Fitbit badges, which are designed to reward your physical activity, Alcaide says the idea is to nudge people toward good habits.
It gave me a little boost, in the same way I feel accomplished when I hit 10,000 steps a day with my Fitbit. I can’t say I’ve changed my work habits substantially as a result of using the device, but I am trying to be more mindful of multitasking. Maybe over a longer period of time, I would have been able to gain more nuanced insights into my focus habits.
All this information It was interesting, but I wondered how accurate it was. Like most tech companies, Neurable doesn’t share the details of 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 when I’m focused and when I’m not.
“It’s possible as long as you can measure EEG signals in a consistent and robust way,” he told me. Yeo’s current work involves trying to measure cognitive decline in older people using EEG.
The challenge in developing portable BCIs compared with invasive ones is that the signal quality is lower because the electrodes have to record through the skin and skull. And whenever there is movement, “you won’t get good skin contact, so the EEG signal may not be picked up,” Yeo says.
Because Neurable doesn’t make any health claims, its headphones don’t have to undergo as rigorous testing as a medical device. Unlike disease detection, which requires placing many more electrodes in specific locations on the scalp, measuring focus is more subjective since there’s no gold standard, Yeo says. The company has ambitions to use its headphones as a medical device to monitor brain health and diagnose neurological diseases, but for now it’s starting with consumer applications.
Still, brainwave data is highly personal, and devices like Neurable’s raise questions about how user data is stored and protected. Molnar explains that the headset converts raw EEG data into focus information, anonymizes it, removes the raw data from the device, and sends it to the app. That focus data is encrypted, uploaded to Neurable’s cloud, and stored in a database. Users’ personal information, such as their name, email address, and password, is encrypted and stored in a separate database.
