A leap in human cognition — mind, body, and context sensing
Over the millennia, humans have continued to evolve in what the mind is able to sense and understand. The amount of blood that flows into our brain has been shown to indicate how much information the mind can process [1]. Living in the age of data, we continuously measure cities, equipment, and our bodies. A next step is to measure the most important component: the mind.
Smartwatches and fitness trackers measure our body and heart, helping us improve our physical health through measurement. Similarly, we need to continuously measure the mind to advance fitness and health.
[1]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.160305
Evolution of the mind
We have evolved over time through exponentially increasing the amount of blood flowing to the brain [1]. Stimulants (e.g. caffeine), hallucinogens, and depressants have intense and sometimes adverse effects on blood flow in the brain. Natural methods of stimulating intense blood flow, such extreme sports or simple activities such as walking help the body. These activities provide a natural way to temporarily stimulate the mind.
To make the next leap in cognition we need to understand how blood flows inside around our brain, quantify that with a valid and reliable metric, and understand how that metric is affected by our surroundings.
Metric based improvement
Repeatedly throughout history humans have shown that, when there is a unit of measure of a physical phenomenon, we can advance ourselves using that unit of measurement. This has been accomplished thus far from deep health-related metrics (such as glucose monitoring) to step and intensity counters for our physical well-being (from companies such as Fitbit (Google), Apple, Garmin, etc.). People use metrics like heart-rate, blood pressure, HRV (heart rate variability), respiratory rate, and many others to advance their physical health. There has yet to be a widely accepted unit of measure for understanding and quantifying measurements of the mind, a task made difficult by reproducibility struggles, lack of real world context collection, and the fact that our minds are forever changing [2]. Understanding how blood flows around and in the brain enables a deeper understanding of which regions become activated when and why. We can learn things such as changes in blood flow that occurs when we are reading or writing [3] to frequency and characteristic changes that occur in anxiety states [4].
[2]: https://eagleman.com/books/livewired/
[3]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581920301828
Measuring changes in blood flow activity has been performed with a multitude of methods over the past five decades; ranging from electromagnetic to light based forms of sensing. Most equipment and machinery used for assessment to date is not that portable or wearable, usually best to be worn while inside and stationary. We need to be able to measure in any environment or context and continuously throughout the day and eventually the night. This will provide a “full movie” understanding of how our mind changes rather than just a short snapshot, which is key to unlocking the true potential of mind sensing.
Opportunity in mind and body sensing
Large clinical equipment is often used to understand the mind, however this equipment is only connected for short periods of time. Imagine if you were asked to understand a full experience of life however you were only given access to short snippet videos and selfies, this misses the “bigger picture”. The assessment and understanding would be limited and thus biased to the information captured in those moments; understanding the whole picture would be impossible.
Similarly, short-time span snippets of flow activity only provides a glimpse as to how our mind responds limiting our understanding and can skew results. For example, in a controlled study that has participants wearing a sensor system for a two hour period, if 20 percent of these participants were affected by a personal occurrence (e.g. having a bad day as self categorized), the treatment assessment could be skewed from the baseline representation within the category. External factors such as the weather on the day the study is completed could also drastically affect how the participants feel or report their state of mind.
To properly measure and further understand the mind we need a continuous day-and-night form of cognitive sensing.
Wearable computers with sensors create a unique opportunity to continuously sense, measure, and understand the mind and body and their surrounding context.
Continuous sensing can provide a map for insight into cognitive health and well-being. We can potentially identify environmental factors that cause stress and focus, as well as potentially indicators towards deeper cognitive health challenges including depression, anxiety, dementia, and cognitive decline.
Short history of cognitive and optical sensing
People have attempted to understand the brain since the 5th century BC, when it was first discovered that the brain is the “seat of intelligence”. The connection between the brain and electricity (electrical brain activity) was first made in the 1870s, and the first human brainwave recording was made in the 1920s. These early brainwave recordings required being tethered to fixed laboratory equipment, but wearable computing emerged in the 1960s as a way of wearing technology to affect and interact with the world.
In the 1970s, optical brain-sensing devices were introduced. Due to their low cost, low power consumption, and potential for miniaturization, they are very well-suited to wearables. However, only recently did fundamental components such as LEDs, photodetectors and analog processing components become low cost and sensitive enough for a sub $200 product. Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) sensors at the right scale can cost in some cases 1/10th the cost of EEG “Electroencephalogram” sensors and are ideal for widely mass-produced wearables. Below is a more detailed history of optical blood flow sensing from the late 1800s to mid 2010's.
Bio-sensing with a light based head-up cue
Our biological brain power, as encoded by evolution, is limited, and we are building system to expand those limits. Compared to all the “smart” things around us, humans are falling behind. In our wearable device, a very simple single light display conveys personal state information to the wearer. This light allows them to understand how relative state changes relative to different situations and times of day.
For example, while in a scattered state of mind an indication can be provided indicating a need to re-centre. Walking can help the individual enter a state-of-flow, which can be measured and optimized for. We enable users to self identify states of mind and track relative to their own personalized data. Through adding motion, location, integration of calendar and manual tagging creates increased depth to the context of information.
Recent past and future
In the future we hope to expand health sensing by identifying longer-term biomarkers to help predict areas of concern such as anxiety (GAD-2), depression (PHQ-9, HAM-D), and ADHD (ASRS). We are also experimenting with combining additional context and internal sensors to provide a much more richly intricate understanding of the world around us and our mind’s response to it.
By combining head-up feedback mechanisms with mind and body sensing, we can leverage closed-loop experiences and their potential for a positive effect on a wearer’s state-of-mind.
About Blueberry:
Blueberry was founded in the winter of 2019. Blueberry sees a world where people are able to interpret their mental state with the same depth that they can understand their heart and movement today. This will have a profound effect on how we make decisions, communicate, manage our cognitive health and use our attention.
