Ten years ago, a Fitbit was about as sophisticated a wearable as you could get. The Apple Watch soon supplanted it, quickly becoming the world’s best-selling smartwatch. Then came the sleeker, more unassuming Oura ring.
Now there’s a new breed of wearables—built for your head. Instead of tracking your step count, heart rate, and skin temperature, these devices are designed to read your brain waves. Using electroencephalography, or EEG, they detect electrical impulses produced by the brain and use AI to make sense of them.
Take Elemind, for example. Rather than just tracking your sleep, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company’s device aims to actually improve it. Elemind’s $350 headband feels straight out of Star Trek and is designed to boost sleep quality. It detects a person’s brain signals to know whether they’re asleep or awake and delivers a type of acoustic stimulation known as pink noise to move the brain from wakeful patterns to delta waves, which represent a deeper sleep. In a small trial of 21 participants, the device helped more than three-quarters of them fall asleep faster.
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If you’re the type to work smarter rather than harder, you can buy a $500 pair of headphones from Boston-based Neurable to hack your productivity. Equipped with EEG sensors, the headphones track brain activity associated with concentration—namely, beta waves—to tell users how focused they are. When I tried them out last year, they confirmed what I already suspected: My most focused working hours are during the morning. The device also nudges you to take the occasional break if it thinks you’ve been deeply focused for too long, a feature I appreciate as someone who spends a lot of time in front of a computer screen.
Apple is also getting into wearable brain tech. The company filed a patent in 2023 for EEG-sensing AirPods, though they have yet to hit the market. Earlier this year, however, Apple unveiled a new accessibility feature to allow its Vision Pro to be controlled with brain waves instead of physical movement. It means that the augmented reality headset can now be integrated with brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs—systems that read brain signals to allow users to control devices with their thoughts.
One neurotech company, Cognixion, is already taking advantage of the new Apple feature. The Santa Barbara, California, startup built an augmented reality app to run on the Vision Pro and a custom headband that detects brain signals. For now, Cognixion is focused on using the tech to help restore communication in people with speech impairments due to paralysis. But it’s not hard to see how a Vision Pro equipped with a BCI could be adopted by a wider population for things like gaming or texting with your mind.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Andreas Melhede of Elata Biosciences, who’s building what he calls the “open internet of brains,” an open-source network where anyone can create a neuro app that can run on an EEG device. The nonprofit organization created its own device and a Pong app, which it demoed this fall during a crypto conference in Singapore. Around 30 people gathered on a restaurant patio to compete in a Pong tournament, but instead of handheld controllers, competitors were fitted with a headset to track their brain signals. Their goal: Hit a ball on a screen with their paddle using just their thoughts.
Pong has been used as a proof of concept in other BCI experiments, including by Neuralink. Melhede told me the tournament was meant to be a fun way to introduce people to neurotech. Developers have already made a few other gaming apps for the Elata network, and he is hoping to attract research and wellness apps as well. “It’s really up to the user what they want to do and for the developer what they want to build,” he says. He was inspired to create Elata after watching a loved one suffer from depression and anxiety, and he thought wearable neurotech could be the answer.
Other wearable makers are seeking regulatory approval as medical devices, like Apple has done for several health features on its smartwatches. Flow Neuroscience of Sweden has developed a headset that emits a type of low-intensity electrical current called transcranial direct current stimulation to treat depression. A companion app provides behavioral therapy, guidance, and monitoring. The device won approval from the US Food and Drug Administration this December as the first at-home, nondrug treatment for major depressive disorder available in the US. It’s also approved in the UK, Europe, Australia, and other markets. In a clinical trial of 174 people, 45 percent of participants who received Flow’s device experienced a remission in symptoms at 10 weeks compared to 22 percent of those in a control group who received a sham version. Flow expects the device to be available in the US in spring of 2026. In the UK, it is already being used by the National Health Service.
While it’s becoming possible for implanted BCIs to decode inner speech and predict some unconscious thoughts, no wearable devices are sophisticated enough to read a person’s private thoughts—yet. These consumer devices rely on AI to help recognize specific brain wave patterns associated with certain states of mind. But that brain wave data is still highly personal and can reveal a lot about a person’s mental or emotional state. Which raises questions around how the data collected from these devices will be stored and protected. The brain is the last frontier of privacy. As if ads weren’t already scarily targeted, just imagine if device makers sold customers’ neuro data to third parties. Or your employer knew how many minutes during the workday you weren’t all that focused.
Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and author of the book Battle for Your Brain, about the new dawn of brain tracking and hacking, predicts that wearable neurotech will eventually become ubiquitous. “They will become commonplace to the point where they’re not even wearable in the sense of headphones and earbuds but little tattoos behind your ear that are integrated with all your devices,” she says. “I think that’s the inevitability of where it goes: seamless integration, brain to devices.”
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