EEG Portable Brain Scanner with a Nokia N900.

The Nokia N900 was featured on New Scientist yesterday as it has been turned into a portable brain scanner of sorts.

Check it out: New Scientist

This apparently will let you monitor neural signals on the go. Just hook up the N900 to a commercially available EEG (electroencephalography) headset and you’re set. This was developed by Jakob Eg Larsen and his colleages at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby.

This is pretty useful, instead of having big expensive labs set up, you could just have a much smaller, portable, cheaper alternative. Another advantage is that you can study more people in more natural environments.  Being a smartphone, you could tie in the data obtained to display pictures, connect up to your doctor/researcher, display pictures on the phone to elicit brain responses. This would be highly ideal in places where health care is not readily available; lower costs to obtain and maintain as well as reduced visits to hospitals.

Right now though there are still of course some limitations. Real time brain mapping is great but for real research, it cannot compare to dedicated medical tools yet.

Source: New Scientist

Cheers David for the tip.

Category: Applications, Maemo, Nokia