Hitachi develops wearable brain scanner
Hitachi has unveiled a portable brain scanner, which measures your grey cells’ activity when worn over the course of a day. At least, I think they have: the photo sparks suspicions it may be a late April Fool illustrated with some archive Virtual Reality headset promo shots from the 1980s.
Still, it apparently involves a 400g headset (pictured) plus a controller that’s strapped to your waist. Running off rechargeable batteries, it measures changes in the blood flow to your brain using Hitachi’s ‘optical topography’ technology. Lasers are involved, happily.
The resulting data is stored in the device’s internal memory, or can be transmitted to a nearby computer via Wi-Fi. Hitachi reckons there are plenty of uses in the medical sector, although the company is also targeting psychology, education, marketing and even entertainment – imagine one of these hooked up to a Wii and Nintendo’s brain-training games…
There’s no news on a release date for the scanner yet. I still think the idea of wearing one of these headsets for a whole day is a bit silly, though. Anyone who does it wants their head examin… Oh.
(via Pink Tentacle)
