China: students undergo trials for new brainwave-detecting headbands

Children in China have been undergoing a trial for a new headband that detects brainwaves and tracks the engagement and the attention level of students during a class. The Focus1 headbands have been designed by a Massachusetts-based start-up by the name of BrainCo, which has been founded by Han Bicheng, a PhD from the Center of Brain Science from Harvard University.

An attempt to track real-time attention levels

According to a description given at the BrainCo website, the technology in the headbands will help teachers with certain kinds of feedbacks that will be contextually relevant and will capture real-time actions of the students that will in turn help teachers to make sustained improvements in their skillsets. 

The Focus1 headbands cost a total of 3,465 Yuan and have sensors installed in them that have been specifically engineered to enable individual use and integrate dozens of headbands that will have the benefit of being simultaneously managed and monitored by a single portal with real-time statistics.

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The headbands just weigh a total of 95 grams and will have a battery with a lifespan of up to 4 hours. The company developing the bands stated that bands and software used in them will help teachers track student engagement and their attention levels during an ongoing class.

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'Donated 50 Focus1 headbands'

Han Bicheng, an alumnus of the Xiaoshan Central Primary School in Jinhua, eastern China, gave them 50 headbands because of which the school has been conducting trials for 1 year with an admission that the test project had improved grades of the students who had undergone the trials.

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'Student feel that they are continuously being watched'

A language teacher at the primary school, Zhang Yiwei, stated that the students are getting the feeling that they are continuously being monitored and are feeling the need to read louder and to pay attention. Zhang said that after using the cutting edge technology for half a semester, his class climbed up two places on the basis of a test result among the school's 4th-grade students. 

BrainCo has now inked a deal with a Chinese distributor to provide 20,000 headbands in order to make them available in classrooms of different schools in China.

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