If you want to bike around Manhattan these days, it’s easy to find an online or physical map that can lead you to the bike lanes and keep you riding safely. But it won’t tell you much more, like which route would be the most relaxing, and which the most demanding of your attention.
That’s exactly the information Arlene Ducao wants to provide with the MindRider Map, which is created by deploying cyclists wearing a helmet that measures their brainwaves.
The helmet is the MindRider, which Ducao helped develop as a grad student at MIT in 2010. The setup is simple: An off-the-shelf EEG brainwave sensor made by NeuroSky is built into a standard helmet. To make the map, eight riders spent September and October riding most of Manhattan (favoring north-south thoroughfares over east-west cross streets). Every second, the EEG sensor sends, via Bluetooth, data on the rider’s level of focus.
via Wired
Image: Arlene Ducao
