I wanted to share with you the project I’ve been working on for the last two years. I was inspired by my background in cognitive science and computer science to build a product that helped make the activity of the mind visible, understandable, and meaningful to improve daily life.
Gain insight into how your mind works by tracking your focus during any activity you choose. Understand yourself. Learn differently.
From the beginning, the Melon headband was built to be worn while engaging in a variety of activities; from working, to studying, playing sports, dancing, practicing an instrument, programming, painting, or doing yoga.
The Melon headband is a wireless brain-sensing device that uses EEG (electroencephalography) to measure your brain activity. From this activity, our algorithms detect your focus, and we use that data to give you personalized feedback on how to improve.
We have partnered with a top producer of EEG signal processing chips to access the best available algorithms for mental state detection. EEG has been used widely in the medical and research fields for over a century, and we’re excited to make the technology available to you through Melon.
The data will be stored on a secure server as well and will be accessible through a web backend as well. We are working on ways for users to be able to export data in with “calendar-esque” functionality that allows you to see progress over time and any other trends in a chronological fashion.
Sounds good! Any plans to provide an API as well? I’d love to be able to correlate that data with data from my Fitbit, my Foursquare checkins etc. I started doing this with a Neurosky MindWave, but that device is too cumbersome to collect data while doing things…
We will be launching an SDK with the headband and it is no extra charge. Would definitely be interested in your findings using NeuroSky and we’ve designed Melon to be easier to use in your everyday life.
Also, we’re working on our stretch goal to add an accelerometer to the Melon headband to be able to pull in activity data for our focus tracking app and for developers to work with this data.
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We will be launching an SDK with the headband and it is no extra charge. Would definitely be interested in your findings using NeuroSky and we’ve designed Melon to be easier to use in your everyday life.[/quote]
For what I am doing now, I’d rather retrieve a user’s historical data through a Web API. For other applications, it’s great to have an SDK for reading data directly off the device.
Regarding the NeuroSky SDK (for Android): The SDK was straightforward to use, but the documentation wasn’t great, and complicated by the fact that the same SDK has to support several devices. Ran into an issue with missing data, which the (very helpful) support team resolved by sending me an updated version of the SDK.
Awesome, I love to hear what people are currently doing so that the team at Melon can learn from the community and integrate the feedback into our development. I think a web api and historical data is a really interesting take on how to expand on the Melon platform and may well be something we begin asap.
I’ll keep you updated, really grateful for your support and feedback!