MAPLE PLAIN, MN–Protolabs has announced that nūrio has been selected as the latest Cool Idea Award winner for innovation in consumer technology. Nūrio is the world’s smallest wearable consumer EEG device that slips over the ear and provides consumers with the ability to control any IoT-enabled device–no voice commands are required.

Nūrio streams data collected from users’ mental activity via Bluetooth to any smartphone, enabling consumers to visualize their brainpower and valuable health insights on the nūrio mobile app.

“We aim to provide the world with access to their mental data to help better understand the previously mysterious mind,” says nūrio founder and CEO Ian Rowan. “We’re entering a new era of leveraging the mind to control the connected world, no matter of a person’s physical abilities."

The device is about the size of a headphone with affordability that can allow anyone with a smartphone the ability to feel comfortable tapping into the power of their mind. The device has been designed to utilize three fully shielded dry skin electrodes along with minimal on-device electronics to stream data via Bluetooth to any smartphone. This allows for the more powerful processors on the smartphone to leverage the data yielding an energy-efficient, safe and minimal wearable which provides unseen insights.

Device data is instantly processed with the nūrio app to provide health insights as well as practical control features. The app provides users with powerful streaming metrics about their mental health/state such as attention, calmness and emotional levels. All metrics are derived from raw EEG data using in-house algorithms based on years of neuroscience research studies. The app also allows the ability to record sessions of these metrics – this can be used to graph insights of attention during any focus-based task, calmness during meditation, or emotions during any type of performance or experience. Finally, nūrio uses machine learning to develop baselines of the users’ mental states to help alert them to changes over time.

The other main component of the nūrio device is the ability to control internet-connected devices with the mind. Users can add compatible IoT devices to their profile, record approximately one minute of thoughts based on that object, and leave it to the powerful nūrio AI algorithms to process their future waves into actionable commands. After set-up, the user can simply blink twice to trigger the device to begin recording a thought, then sent to nūrio servers which process the raw wave into the user’s device, and finally the device is triggered or the user is prompted to confirm a command with a blink based on configuration. All of this typically happens in under two seconds.