What's on your mind? For £79, anyone can buy a headset that reads the electrical activity of their brain. It's called an electroencephalogram, or EEG, and you can use it to control devices with the power of your mind. But there's a drawback: they don't work when the wearer is moving and they look silly, so no one wants to wear them.
The solution could be a kind of EEG system that does away with the cumbersome electrodes, annoying gels and wires of its predecessors, replacing them with a flexible electronic skin that conforms to the body. It promises to let us monitor our brains discreetly 24 hours a day, and can be worn continuously for two weeks, staying put whether you're swimming, running or sleeping.
John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign led the team that built the device, which is so light that it sticks to the skin through van der Waals force – the same mechanism that lets geckos' feet stick to surfaces. It only falls off when the build-up of dead skin beneath it makes it lose its grip.
Comprising just a small patch of gold electrodes on and behind the ear, it beats the existing tech, described by Rogers as a "rat's nest of wires attached to devices that interface to the skin with tape and gels and bulky metallic objects".
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