Shove it, questionnaires. There’s a new way to test who’s about to lose their mind.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin developed a forehead monitor that could help us track — and eventually, manage — our mental workloads.
The tech, they say, knows you’re about to crack before you do and the hope, per The Guardian, is that this technology can save many lives.
What exactly is going on here?
The device combines EEG (brainwaves) and EOG (eye movement) sensors in a thin, wireless patch that is adhered to the forehead to create a full “e-tattoo,” complete with associated electrodes. It’s a real cyberpunky look.
The UT Austin team’s study tracked participants’ brain activity as they ran through tasks of variable difficulty, then fed the data into a machine learning model trained to predict mental workload levels.
- And that’s exactly what it did — it successfully tracked how hard participants’ brains were working and predicted when their mental acuity would drop.
Can this be used to show your boss how badly they’ve broken you?
… Yeah, this seems doable, though researchers are more aiming to use this tech as “a real-time mental workload decoder” to alert people in high-stakes jobs, such as pilots, air traffic controllers, doctors, and emergency dispatchers — basically anyone whose mental lapse could kill people — to offload their work.
The disposable e-tattoos are expected to cost around $20 a pop, with the core device (chips and battery) running about $200, and the team is working to connect the signals to an app that could warn users (or perhaps bosses) when mental overload is nigh.
- It isn’t hard to imagine an airline making some version of this tech mandatory during pre-flight activity. Or a hospital requiring it for surgeons before scrubbing in.
One potential barrier? The electrodes aren’t compatible with hair, so the e-tattoo will be a hard sell for anyone self-conscious about their fuzzy forehead (cue you walking to a mirror just to be sure).