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