NeuroSky MindWave: Fun with Brainwaves

In last week's Gearhead I discussed, in part, the science of electroencephalography or EEG … the detection and measurement of the neurological activity of the brain via electrodes attached to a subject's scalp.

To recap, different parts of the scalp generate various frequencies dependent upon the subject's mental state and the product I discussed is designed to take advantage of these signals to determine how fatigued the driver of a vehicle is. The goal is reduce accidents and, as I discussed, it's a powerful concept.

Until recently, equipment to perform brainwave monitoring was very expensive and really only practical for laboratory settings. What has changed, as I discussed last week, is the development of cheap and sophisticated signal processing technology small enough to be built into head-mounted devices.

Last week's EEG electrode platform was built into a cap. This week I have a similar but less discrete system that detects both EEG and electromyography signals (or EMG), the latter being the signals generated by muscles.

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In last week's Gearhead I discussed, in part, the science of electroencephalography or EEG … the detection and measurement of the neurological activity of the brain via electrodes attached to a subject's scalp.

To recap, different parts of the scalp generate various frequencies dependent upon the subject's mental state and the product I discussed is designed to take advantage of these signals to determine how fatigued the driver of a vehicle is. The goal is reduce accidents and, as I discussed, it's a powerful concept.

Until recently, equipment to perform brainwave monitoring was very expensive and really only practical for laboratory settings. What has changed, as I discussed last week, is the development of cheap and sophisticated signal processing technology small enough to be built into head-mounted devices.

Last week's EEG electrode platform was built into a cap. This week I have a similar but less discrete system that detects both EEG and electromyography signals (or EMG), the latter being the signals generated by muscles.

The NeuroSky MindWave headset makes you look rather like you're auditioning for Star Trek, although the design is definitely more "Next Generation" than classic Star Trek.

Click to see: Picture of The NeuroSky MindWave headset

The MindWave has two dry sensor contacts, one that touches your forehead and another that clips onto your left earlobe. Power is provided by a single AAA battery in the rectangular housing that sits behind your left ear and the power switch and power-on light are located on the top surface of the "hub" above your left ear.  The entire assembly is reasonably comfortable to wear for maybe an hour.

The combination of sensors allows the MindWave to detect when you are attentive and or meditative (you can be both at once), when you blink (EMG), and activity in a range of EEG frequency bands from 0.5Hz to 50Hz.

The determination of attentive and meditative states is done by monitoring several bands at once and is carried out by NeuroSky's proprietary algorithms embedded in the headset's signal processing software.

The MindWave headset communicates with a computer via a USB-interfaced "dongle" and requires driver software to be installed on the host system.

The driver software is straightforward to install under Windows (I used an HP laptop running Windows 7 Home Ultimate) and, while not hard under OS X (I used it on an iMac running OS X 10.7.2), it is a slightly clumsier process requiring you to run two downloads, one after the other in order.

After the drivers are installed you have to run the MindWave Manager application to register the MindWave headset with the computer. Once registered, the ThinkGear Connector, another driver that bridges between the USB driver and MindWave-enabled Flash applications, is loaded (it is configured to load automatically when Windows or OS X starts). There's also yet another driver, the CogniScore Connector, that tracks your achievements with applications that exercise and test your mental abilities and file their assessment of your skills with the "connector".