melding with machines

Here’s a headline worth pondering: “Chinese parents want students to wear dystopian brainwave-detecting headbands.” The story, on the website SupChina, details the latest innovation at the Jiangnan Experimental School in Hangzhou.

Interestingly enough, the electronic headband, dubbed Focus EDU, is made by a Harvard-incubated American startup, BrainCo, based in Somerville, Massachusetts—right next to Cambridge.
As the company’s chatty video explains, in a traditional classroom, “It can be challenging to teachers to easily understand their students’ comprehension of the material.” Yet with Focus EDU, “teachers can easily observe all of their students’ attention levels from one place.”

Here.