Figuring out what is going on in the brain is considered to be very difficult. One major challenge is that the best ways to do so are room-sized machines, but brain.space is hoping that its portable, powerful and, most importantly, user-friendly EEG helmet could power new applications and treatments at home.
The brain can be monitored with the use of an established method, known as EEG. If the user is concentrating, agitated, or both, then the areas of the cortex are active. It's not as precise as an MRI, but you don't need a set of electrical contacts on the brain to use it.
There has been little advancement in the field of EEG tech, and it is often done the same way it was done decades ago. Recently, that has begun to change with the use of re-engineering EEG to interpret signals with the goal of allowing people with motor impairments to communicate.
The Israel-based brain.space claims to provide superior readings to traditional ones, but is wireless and can be set up without expert help.
It was designed to be the cheapest and easiest to use headset in the world. brain.space CEO and co-founder Yair Levy said that one headset for multiple people that automatically configured itself to each person's head. The headset is fully automated and can be set up and run on its own.
Other EEG setups are even worse. The power regulator is called the armband. The image is from brain.space.
The company has no peer-reviewed documentation on the headset's efficacy and resolution as it is only just emerging from stealth.
If they did more or less what they did in a portable, user-friendly form, that would be enough to celebrate.
The company has improved on existing designs by including more densely packed electrodes and ones that do not require any kind of oil or gel on the skin.
Levy explained that their internal studies show that the signal overlaps follow a power law, meaning they can be manipulated. A clean data output can be used as training material for machine learning systems.
Although the headset is a big piece of the puzzle, the company won't only be making and distributing it.
The image is from brain.space.
It's not something you'll do on your morning run or while standing at your desk if you wear a helmet that makes you look like Marvin the Martian. It is still a situational medical device. This can still be transformational, like other advances in technology that have brought medical monitoring devices to the home.
The obvious answer was mapping, but the reality was that developers did more innovative things with it. We see our job as to allow innovation to occur around brain activity, not build out use-case ourselves.
If they didn't have any use cases in mind, they wouldn't have been able to fund four years of R&D. The company told me that the cost of the headset depends on the application and requirements. Bargain-bin setups go for under a grand, while medical-research-grade ones run around $10,000, and brain.space would likely fall in between.
An experiment set on the International Space Station is the first public demonstration of the tech. Brain.space is taking part in the first privately funded mission to the International Space Station, which will have a host of interesting experiments and projects on board.
Participants in the study will use the headset on the surface while doing a number of tasks, then repeat those tasks on the space station. The reasoning for the experiment was described by the company.
brain.space has set itself the goal to become the standard for monitoring neuro-wellness in space.
While there is data collection being carried out for various physiological measurements, such as heart rate, galvanic skin resistance, and muscle mass, there is currently no high-quality longitudinal data regarding the neural changes in prolonged space missions. Such information can be vital in assessing day-to-day plastic changes in the brain and predicting how the brain will adapt to long-term space travel.
NASA and other space agencies have done similar experiments in the past, but they were with old-school gear. This is a proof of the idea that cognitive function in space can be tested with relatively little trouble. On a trip to Mars, no one wants to take a weekly cognitive load test.
brain.space has raised an $8.5 million seed round led by Mangrove Capital Partners. It isn't cheap doing medical device R&D, but there is a market for it. As it enters more public testing, we should hear more about the headset's advantages.
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