The MindRider Helmet can read your mind as you bike to work. That’s right–with the help of an EEG sensor that displays your stress levels, it tells you how your mind is reacting to your commute.
A sensor translates your mind’s engagement but lighting up from green to red and the results are linked up with your smartphone so you can see them on your MindRider app after you bike to work.
The app shows you red hotspots, where you’re most focused and when you’re the most relaxed via green “sweet spots” when you bike to work. It can give you all sorts of insights like where you need better bike lanes and where pot holes, tractor trailers, and road construction stressed you out in your morning commute.
“It indicates your mental state by flashing a visual vocabulary of traffic lights,” says MindRider inventor Arlene Ducao, reported in Wired. “Green is low stress, red is high stress and blinking lights indicate panic.”
The first MindRider was invented at MIT and since then the inventors have been working to come up with cool lightweight helmets that show how your mind reacts to your favorite activities. Their Kickstarter campaign is going on right now.
But the helmet isn’t just for your morning commute. You can use it in all sorts of other activities like rock climbing or skateboarding to see at which points you’re the most engaged. It can also be used to share your routes with friends to show the best bike routes in your city. The helmet uses Neurosky Mindset biosensor innovation in wearable technology to pick up ten types of brain waves. Ducao hopes the next step will be expanding the mental states that the helmet tracks.
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Images: Ben Tudhope