How do you check if all the students in your class have lost concentration? Or help teachers’ design their lessons so that kids don’t lose focus halfway through? Simple: stick a brainwave-sensing headband onto students’ heads and track their attention levels.
Or so believes BrainCo, an American company demoing its Focus headband at CES. It works by monitoring brainwaves and then interpreting those into figures that reflect how much someone is concentrating on any given task.
A teacher can then spot individuals who have become distracted, or pick out patterns that show when they lose a class’ attention after, say, ten minutes of talking at them.
The Focus headband isn’t shipping yet, but a deal has already been struck in China, so it’s conceivable that the Focus headband could be heading to forward-thinking British educational establishments by 2020 (although the answer to this article’s main question is, I admit, a resounding no).
How much per headband, you might be wondering? The company’s staff were reluctant to give me even a vague figure, but after multiple pleas the CEO relented and said “a few hundred dollars”.
As such, you’d need to be a very forward-thinking school to invest in the BrainCo Focus, but for colleges and universities hunting for data that they can make genuine decisions on, that may be a price they’re willing to pay.
Now click here: read all of our coverage from CES 2018
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