From Motherboard, September 21:
Critics doubt that Emotiv's earphone-style sensors can reliably track things like stress and attention—and some worry the technology will become yet another form of workplace surveillance.
The MN8 electroencephalography device looks like any set of sleek wireless earphones. Its buds can rest unobtrusively in the ear's concha for a whole workday and that, its makers at San Francisco-based Emotiv say, is the point. You and everyone around you forgets you’re wearing a device that is monitoring your brainwaves for signs of stress, focus, and attention.
The purpose of the headset, after all, is for companies to collect brain data from their employees.
....MUCH MOREThe MN8 is the centerpiece of an Emotiv program promoted as a way to create safer, more efficient workplaces by monitoring the brain signals of workers and then using that data to retool the workday. The company has promoted it at a forum sponsored by Fortune Magazine and among the well-heeled at the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos.
Neuroscientist and Emotiv president Oliver Oullier said the data has led companies to adjust the scheduling of tasks needing high attention, improve the training process, start work days later (because morning traffic was shown, predictably, shown to heighten stress).
“We provide hardware and algorithmic solutions that have a track record of being used to inform programs that have led to allowing people to work less time, decrease absenteeism, decrease accidents and improve their productivity,” Oullier told Motherboard in an email....
