A while back, I watched a TED Talk by Tan Le, the founder of EMOTIV. It was a showcase of their newest product: Brainwear®. I found it very fascinating. This is device was a wearable EEG. An EEG (electroencephalogram) is a way to detect the brain’s electrical activity. It gives us insight into what parts of the brain are being stimulated in response to certain actions. However, EEGs are complex and bulky so you not going to see them anywhere expect a lab or hospital. What EMOTIV has done is it has compressed the hardware into a small headset. Now the headset is pretty cool and you can find it on their website that I linked below. On the outside, it looks like a curve with multiple probes coming out and reaching towards areas around your head.
The implications of this are pretty massive. As I said before, you are really only going to find an EEG in a lab/hospital, and although many actions and responses can be replicated at the site, many more can’t. However, with a device you can wear 24/7, your everyday actions and your brain’s reaction of them can be recorded, monitored, and studied. It will give a more natural picture (because being in a lab tends to change results).
But how could this get us closer to find ways to combat autism? Autistic people, especially kids, don’t do well with unfamiliar situations and places. I think it is fair to say going to a weird new lab and getting a bunch of EEG probes stuck on their heads isn’t going to settle well with them. The stuff like Brainwear®, however, is just like a hat. It would be much easier to get a hang of for them. Wearable EEGs can discover new things about autism and its possible treatments. The results won’t be so skewed from the uncomfortableness of a lab.
Innovations and discoveries like this really will propel us forward in the fields of neuro- and cognitive science. Progress in those fields, will, in turn, help us get closer to treatments, and, hopefully, an eventual cure to autism.
Here are the links to the stuff I was talking about if you’re interested.
Autism Aid 