The Emotiv Insight offers a new way to measure performance on the job, writes Craig Donaldson
The Emotiv Insight is a sleek, five-channel, wireless headset that reads brainwaves and translates them into meaningful data to help track cognitive health. Developed by Emotiv Lifesciences, a US-based bioinformatics company which leverages cloud computing, big data and mobile technology to provide valuable insights and accelerate brain research globally, the Insight is specially designed to measure and track cognitive health and fitness.
Wearable devices have gained a lot of momentum in recent years, according to Emotiv Lifesciences’ VP corporate development, Kim Du.
“But most of these devices are focused on tracking physical health. The Insight is like other wearable devices, but instead of tracking the number of steps you’ve taken, it tracks your cognitive performance. We believe that cognitive health and fitness is a key missing element up until now,” she says.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is the only current method of measuring brain activity that is safe for children and adults of all ages and medical conditions. What makes the Emotiv Insight different, according to Du, is that it offers an inexpensive, uncomplicated way to regularly measure brain performance.
“It provides metrics for desirable and undesirable characteristics which are familiar to the users, and the recorded levels of these metrics during different sessions of similar activity can be used to reveal details about how the user can improve their performance or mental attitudes based on the differences between specific sessions,” she says.
“For example, does playing classical music allow you to focus more or less when you are studying? Do you study better late at night or early in the morning? With the feedback provided by Emotiv Insight detections you will be able to assess and improve your performance.”
What does it measure?
Emotiv Insight provides five basic measures of mental performance, derived directly from your mental activity, according to Du.
“Each measure is automatically scaled to suit your normal range and base level of each condition – the system learns your usual state and capabilities and provides an adjusted value showing your relative performance on each occasion, compared to your overall behaviour,” she says.
“We also record the raw levels for each user so you can directly compare performance with your social group, people like you (similar age, gender, country, lifestyle etcetera) and the overall population.” These measures include:
- Engagement: your level of immersion in the moment, which is a combination of attention and concentration.
- Focus: a measure of your fixed attention to one specific task. Focus measures the depth of attention as well as the frequency that your attention switches between tasks. A high level of task-switching is an indication of poor focus and distraction. Focus is closely related to “flow state”.
- Interest: the degree of attraction or aversion to your current activity. Low interest scores indicate a strong aversion to the task; high interest indicates a strong affinity with the task while mid-range scores indicate you neither like nor dislike the activity. Interest is related to your enjoyment of the current task.
- Relaxation: a measure of your ability to switch off and allow yourself to rest and recover from intense concentration. Trained meditators can score extremely high relaxation scores.
- Stress: a measure of your level of comfort with the current challenge. High stress can result from an inability to complete a difficult task, feeling overwhelmed and fearing negative consequences for failing to satisfy the task requirements. Generally, a low to moderate level of stress can improve productivity, whereas a higher level tends to be destructive and can have long-term consequences for health and wellbeing.
Improving performance and productivity
The Emotiv Insight is designed to provide users with an optimal productivity profile.
“So we look at when you’re paying attention, the time of day and how long you can pay attention for, your interest levels, your bursts of focus, as well as how well you can relax and your stress levels,” says Du. The corresponding Emotiv Insight application allows users to specify the kinds of activities they are undertaking and the surrounding context.
“After a brief calibration where you relax and provide the system with your background mental state, the application will collect information about your chosen activities and combine it with other contextual information,” she explains.
Users’ mental activities are monitored, and many different metrics are calculated and can be displayed in real time.
“The data is uploaded to our cloud server where it can be analysed further and compared with your other sessions, and also with those of your friends, the population norms for your own demographic group and the entire population, depending on the kinds of reports you wish to generate,” says Du.
This allows users to put their performance in context, strive to score better or improve faster than their social group, or simply improve their own performance against their prior sessions. The level of interaction with social groups and the general population can be selected and changed at any time, and users’ data is always kept private until they choose to share it.
“Research has shown that when you are made aware of all of these indicators, people are better informed and empowered to make decisions to optimise and improve their cognitive fitness and performance,” says Du.
