This new device can read your mind

Each week, we spotlight a cool innovation recommended by some of the industry's top tech writers. This week's pick is a wearable device that responds to nonverbal commands.

Researchers from MIT have created a wearable device that "can recognize nonverbal prompts, essentially 'reading your mind,'" said Thuy Ong at The Verge. The AlterEgo — which loops around a user's ear, follows the jawline, and attaches underneath the mouth — contains electrodes that detect "neuromuscular signals in your jaw and face" that are activated by internal verbalizations, or the words you're saying in your head.

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Invisible to the human eye, the signals are fed into a machine-learning system that associates "specific signals with words," so a user can control other devices without any movements or audible voice commands. In the above video demonstrating the AlterEgo's capabilities, a completely still user scrolls through a streaming-video menu by simply thinking directions such as "down" and "right." In tests, the device showed 92 percent accuracy when trained on the relatively limited vocabulary of 20 words.

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