Head Tech

The discussion about wearable technology recently has mostly been
about various devices, like watches and bands, that we wear on our
wrists to communicate, measure our health, etc.  But from a
technological perspective, if not yet a commercial viewpoint, these are
old hat.

How about some new hats?  Like this one …

image

These more interesting – and maybe a bit more eerie – wearables are
what I’d call “Head Tech”.  That’s technology that we place on our
heads.

Last year, following along the lines of various universities such as the University of Minnesota, the Portuguese firm Tekever demonstrated
Brainflight which enabled a person to control the flight of a drone
through the thoughts of someone wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG)
skull cap with more than a hundred electrodes.  Here’s the BBC report –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LuImMOZOo0

This has become a fascination of so many engineers that a few months ago the University of Florida held the first brain-controlled drone race.  Its larger goal was to popularize the use of brain-computer interfaces.

Of
course, anything that gets more popular faces its critics and
satirists.  So one of GE’s more memorable commercials is called
BrainDrone – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0-UjJpRguM

Not to be outdone, a couple of weeks ago, the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Lab at Arizona State University unveiled
a system to use that approach to control not only a single drone, but a
swarm of drones.  You can see an explanation in this video – https://vimeo.com/173548439

While
drones have their recreational and surveillance uses, they’re only one
example.  Another piece of Head Tech gear comes from Smartstones, working with Emotiv’s less medical-looking EEG.

image

It enables people who are unable to speak to use their minds to communicate.  As they describe it:

“By
pairing our revolutionary sensory communication app :prose with an EEG
headset powered by Emotiv, we are enabling a thought-to-speech solution
that is affordable, accessible and mobile for the first time ever. Users
can record and command up to 24 unique phrases that can be spoken aloud
in any language.”

There’s a very touching video here – https://vimeo.com/163235266

Emotiv has other ambitious plans for their product as they relate in this video –

https://vimeo.com/159560626

The geekiness of some these may remind you of Google Glass. Unlike Google Glass, though, they offer dramatic value
for people who have special but critical needs.  For that reason, I
expect some version of these will be developed further and will succeed.

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/148399117751/head-tech]

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