Though EEG (Electroencephalography) has been around for decades, now, new technology allows us to detect and measure brain activity with a lightweight headset and mobile phone. National Geographic Emerging Explorer and entrepreneur Tan Le demonstrates how her company's EEG headset and software can be used for a variety of research purposes.
-Originally published August 1, 2013
Tan Le
National Geographic Emerging Explorer
So, EEG has been around since the 1930's, but the way in which we've collected those signals have been very much confined to a clinical context. The benefit now is that you can collect this data in a highly contextualized manner.
This particular headset provides coverage of key EEG sites around the cerebral cortex. Within a few minutes the signals will settle and you're ready to collect EEG. And so, with this it gives you an insight to someone's emotional state in real time.
She's awesome. So Amazing.
You record the data and once you complete your recording the rest of the data is sent to the cloud and then it generates a report to let you know how you performed essentially.
I had a relatively high degree of emotional arousal to that content because I am a woman trying to forge new frontiers and so that really resonated with me. There was a really strong degree of emotional positivity towards that segment and also I was pretty engaged. I had a high degree of attention and emersion. And the idea with this is it's not a one-time score but it's about getting a longitudinal sense of your activities. What interests you, how often are you engaged, how engaged are you.
The four main areas that we're starting to see the bulk of the activity is around, human-machine interaction, around learning, understanding consumer behavior or market research and the fourth area is medical and research.
What's great about having systems that are portable and relatively affordable is that people are starting to explore new ways of using EEG to capture information about the brains network connectivity across a broad range of real life situations.
