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Spinoff story
Brainwaves Reveal Student Engagement, Operate Household Objects
A real-world story of NASA technology finding a life beyond the mission.
About this technology
Overview
In the mid-1990s, a team at Langley Research Center studying pilots’ mental states created an “engagement index” to gauge subjects’ attention levels based on their brainwaves. The team then demonstrated that subjects who were shown their engagement score could learn to control it. Decades later, the founders of BrainCo in Cambridge, Massachusetts, came across the work and incorporated it into a system for monitoring students’ engagement and teaching kids with ADHD to control their attention by controlling video games or even objects around them.