The Bike Helmet That Reads Your Brainwaves

"This is your brain on bike," said Arlene Ducao at a recent talk in New York City, showing off a map of city streets studded with colorful dots. Ducao is the inventors of MindRider, the bike helmet that reads its riders' brainwaves. The helmet also correlates the bikers' mental state with their geographical routes, creating maps of what Ducao calls the city's "psychogeography."

Sound neat? The Kickstarter campaign launched today. 

Ducao came up with the helmet idea while a student at the MIT Media Lab, and is now hoping to make it a real product. The helmet has a commercially available EEG sensor embedded in its foam, which is supposed to register the rider's mental state on a continuum of relaxed to focused concentration. A small LED light on the helmet indicates that mental state in real time (from green for relaxed to red for intense attention), and the information is also sent to the MindRider app on the user's phone.  

With the app, users can examine maps of their bike routes and potentially determine which streets are stressing them out. In the Kickstarter video below, one rider says the information gives him "insight into where we need better bike lanes." 

It remains to be seen if bike riders are eager to analyze their on-the-go neural activity. But this clever piece of hardware is part of a trend enabled by newly cheap and available brain monitoring systems. It seems likely that quantified selfers will soon have many opportunities to track not just their steps and heart rates, but also their brain patterns.