The New Frontier of Wearables: Devices That Read Your Brain
A decade ago, Fitbit represented the peak of accessible consumer wearable technology. It wasn’t long before the Apple Watch knocked it from the top spot, quickly rising to become the world’s best-selling smartwatch. Next came the slimmer, far more discreet Oura Ring, which shifted popular wearable focus to subtle, all-day biometric tracking. Today, an entirely new category of wearables is emerging—one designed for your head, that tracks far more than just basic bodily metrics.
Unlike earlier generations of wearables that count steps, monitor resting heart rate, or track skin temperature, this new wave of devices is built to read your brain’s native activity. Powered by electroencephalography, more commonly known as EEG, they pick up on the electrical impulses generated by brain cells, then use artificial intelligence to parse what that activity means.
Take Elemind, for instance. Rather than only logging how long you sleep each night, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup’s product is engineered to actively improve sleep quality. Priced at $350, Elemind’s futuristic headband looks straight out of a Star Trek set, and works by reading a user’s unique brain signals to identify whether they are awake or asleep. It then delivers pink noise, a well-studied form of acoustic stimulation, that guides the brain away from active, wakeful patterns and toward delta waves—the brain activity linked to deep, restorative sleep. In a small trial with 21 participants, more than three-quarters of users were able to fall asleep faster while using the device.
For users looking to boost rather than rest their brain, Boston-based startup Neurable sells a $500 pair of EEG-equipped headphones built to hack work productivity. The built-in sensors track beta waves, the brain activity linked to focused attention, and give users real-time updates on how concentrated they are. When I tested the headphones last year, they confirmed what I’d already long suspected: my peak focused working hours fall in the early morning. I also appreciated one thoughtful feature: if the device detects you’ve been deeply focused for an extended stretch, it nudges you to take a short break—an extremely useful reminder for anyone who spends most of their workday glued to a computer screen.
Tech giant Apple is also throwing its weight behind wearable brain technology. The company filed a 2023 patent for EEG-enabled AirPods, though those have yet to hit the consumer market. Earlier this year, however, Apple rolled out a new accessibility feature that lets its Vision Pro mixed-reality headset be controlled by brain activity, rather than physical movement. This update integrates the headset with brain-computer interfaces (BCIs)—systems that read brain signals to let users control devices with their thoughts alone.
One neurotech startup, California-based Cognixion, has already built tools to take advantage of this new Apple capability. The Santa Barbara company developed a custom AR app for Vision Pro paired with a purpose-built brain-sensing headband. Right now, Cognixion’s core mission is using this technology to help people with speech loss caused by paralysis regain the ability to communicate. But it’s not hard to imagine BCI-equipped Vision Pro devices catching on with mainstream consumers for everything from mind-controlled gaming to texting with your thoughts.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Andreas Melhede, founder of Elata Biosciences, who is building what he calls the “open internet of brains”—an open-source network that lets any developer build a neuro-focused app compatible with standard EEG devices. The non-profit organization has built its own EEG headset and a simple Pong game, which it demoed this past fall at a crypto conference in Singapore. Around 30 attendees gathered on a restaurant patio to compete in a Pong tournament, but instead of using traditional handheld controllers, competitors wore headsets that tracked their brain activity. Their only goal? Move the paddle to hit the on-screen ball using nothing but their thoughts.
Pong has long been used as a proof of concept for BCI technology, including by Neuralink. Melhede explained that the tournament was designed to be a lighthearted, accessible way to introduce mainstream audiences to neurotech. Developers have already built several other gaming apps for the Elata network, and Melhede hopes to attract more research and wellness-focused apps down the line. “It’s really up to the user what they want to do and for the developer what they want to build,” he told me. Melhede was inspired to launch Elata after watching a loved one struggle with depression and anxiety, and he believes accessible wearable neurotech could be a life-changing tool for people dealing with common mental health conditions.
Other wearable neurotech makers are pursuing full regulatory approval as medical devices, a path Apple has already taken for several core health features on its smartwatches. Sweden’s Flow Neuroscience has developed a headset that delivers transcranial direct current stimulation, a low-intensity electrical current, to treat depression. A paired companion app offers behavioral therapy, treatment guidance, and ongoing symptom monitoring.
This past December, the device won approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, becoming the first at-home, non-pharmaceutical treatment for major depressive disorder available to U.S. consumers. It already holds approval in the UK, European Union, Australia, and multiple other markets. In a clinical trial with 174 participants, 45% of people using Flow’s device saw their depression symptoms go into remission after 10 weeks, compared to just 22% of participants in the control group who used a placebo device. Flow expects to launch the device in the U.S. in spring 2026, and it is already available for use through the UK’s National Health Service.
While implanted BCIs have advanced enough to decode inner speech and detect some unconscious thoughts, no consumer wearable available today is sophisticated enough to read a person’s private thoughts—at least not yet. Current consumer wearables only use AI to identify broad brain wave patterns linked to specific mental states. Even so, brain wave data is deeply personal, and can reveal a huge amount of sensitive detail about a person’s mental and emotional health. That has sparked urgent questions about how this data will be stored and kept secure.
The brain is the final frontier of personal privacy. Today’s targeted digital ads already feel unnervingly precise; just imagine if device makers sold consumer neuro data to third-party advertisers. Or think of the workplace implications if your employer could see exactly how many minutes of your workday you were not fully focused.
Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and author of Battle for Your Brain—a book exploring the rise of brain tracking and neuro hacking—predicts that wearable neurotech will eventually become ubiquitous. “They will become commonplace to the point where they're not even wearable in the sense of headphones and earbuds but little tattoos behind your ear that are integrated with all your devices,” she says. “I think that’s the inevitability of where it goes: seamless integration, brain to devices.”
