Monday, February 3, 2014

PilotAngel and the Newest Wearables


One of the winners at the AT&T Hackathon, PilotAngel, made interesting use of an interesting wearable: the Neurosky Mindwave sensor.

It just looks like a little-bit-heavyweight headset:

But it allows your brainwaves to be digitally monitored and reordered.

Most of the applications available on the actual web-site appear to be self-experimental: attempting to get yourself into the meditation zone, or something like that.

But at the Hackathon, several real-world applications of interest were seen. One of these was Pilot Angel. 

The idea is, that if the operator of a vehicle starts entering into sleep brain-wave patterns then an alert goes out, which if unresponded to, gets escalated to a supervisor. It's kind of amazing that such things are rapidly leaving science-fiction and entering the realm of actual technology.

From their presentation:
It's time to stop the catastrophes seen in the news with ships, airlines, trains. Often this is not negligence but loss of focus and “Highway Hypnosis”.
  T
eam "
Pilot Angel" 
created
  a functioning proof of concept at the AT&T DevSummit hackathon
 
for CES 2014 u
sing 
  • Neurosky Mindwave sensors
    ,
      
  • a Nokia Windows Phone app,
     
  • a pebble smart watch
     
they monitored and analyzed pilot’s brain waves in real-time,  detecting
 
loss of
 focus and  triggering awareness-boosting lighting using Philips Hue lights and text-messaging & Pebble watch alerts to the pilot and their supervisors along with GPS location data. PilotAngel is looking to make the proof of concept a reality
 and create a start up. 
Pilot Angel
 is open to team up with various partners and angel investors.
Read more about this and a few other wearables here.  And you can see the demo here:


I hope that Pilot Angel -- a team that had my vote -- goes forward with their idea. I think it's important for hackathon winners to take their ideas as far as they can.

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO

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