by When Apple launched its watch in 2015, the wearable felt like a gadget. Ten years later, millions of users use its heart rate and movement tracking functions, and some even detect arrhythmia and Parkinson’s disease with it.
Neural co-founder Dr Ramses Alcaide wants us to be able to do the same for our brains.
“It’s crazy that we’re not tracking the most important organ in our body,” he told Euronews Next. “There are people with Alzheimer’s who don’t even know they have these diseases until ten years in. That’s crazy, and it shouldn’t happen anymore”.
While classic instruments for recording brain waves, electroencephalograms (EEG), are usually wearable devices with over a hundred sensors, Neurable has spent the last decade creating an EEG device that can fit into a headset.
The company believes that tracking your brain waves can help you focus and improve lives, including through Alzheimer’s, post-traumatic stress disorder, Parkinson’s disease, fatigue, and even attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to trace.
How Neurable headphones work
Connections between the neurons in our brain create electrical activity, which increases when we focus. EEGs track the activity that pours out of our brains and into our scalps.
Neurable technology uses AI to amplify the signals and detect patterns using algorithms. Depending on the brain wave, the tech can determine whether a person is focused or not.
“Your brain gets tired before your body does, but you usually only take a break when your body gets tired because your brain has no pain receptors. You can’t tell he’s tired,” explained Alcaide, who suffers from ADHD himself and uses the headphones to focus.
“The headphones help prevent burnout by letting me know when I should be taking breaks at the right time. And if I ever get distracted, it will play an audible tone to remind me to focus again. I use that a lot when I read,” he detailed.
Neurable only builds the AI part of this brain-computer interface (BCI) and partners with manufacturers to include EEG in their products.
His first headphones were developed with high-end audio equipment creator Master & Dynamic. While they track their brainwaves, users can listen to music and cancel out outside noise, just like other high-end headphones.
Wait, what about my details?
Although language can be decoded “to some extent” with BCIs, this is currently only possible with invasive devices or MRIs.
The company prides itself on selling to end users instead of corporations and using data “to directly benefit the person it comes from,” according to Adam Molnar, Neurable’s co-founder and data privacy expert. The Neurable chip in headphones processes raw user data and deauthenticates it before sharing it with the accompanying app.
Although they treat data with care, the founders are also confident that the information is not sensitive if it falls into the hands of hackers.
“Say you had someone’s focus streams, you’d need a lot more information, what they were doing and where they were, to start making an ‘unethical inference’. And we don’t put that in the app,” Molnar said.
The co-founder added that despite the many potential abuses of BCI, Neurable is focusing on the “most beneficial” uses.
“When you’re driving, there’s an engine signal when your oil needs to be changed. You can still drive hundreds, if not thousands of miles when the light is on, but it is recommended that if you take care of this, you can help the machines in the long term. And I don’t think the brain is that different,” Molnar explained.
Cognitive disequilibrium
For Dr. Marcello Ienca, professor of AI ethics and neuroscience at the Technical University of Munich, devices that enhance our abilities are exciting but require care.
He pointed out that the success of BCIs depends on their responsible use and attention to privacy. He also warned about the risks of inequality.
“I don’t think this technology is unethical per se, we humans tend to improve our functions all the time. But doing it in a world where technology is unevenly distributed will be very risky. It will increase inequality in the world more than anything else because it introduces cognitive inequality,” he said of technologies like Neurable headphones, which can boost people’s mental abilities.
The Neurable MW75 Neurable headphones can be pre-ordered right now for $700 (€645) (Master & Dynamic’s original, AI-free model costs $100 (€92) less), with orders shipping to the US and Canada starting in mid Autumn.
“We want to be able to integrate this with less expensive products so that it increases the accessibility of the product. But it is in the high spectrum that most of the products with deep technology start. Think of the Tesla Roadster, which became more scalable as different models were released,” said co-founder Molnar.
If accepted by the general public, Neurable’s technology would open the doors to tracking brain activity at home on an unprecedented scale.
“We’re giving people the agency to understand how their brain is working so they can act on it better,” Molnar said.
