Neurosky lets your your brainwaves do things — supposedly

This intriguing Cupertino start-up Neurosky escaped our attention, until Michael Arrington pointed it out over the weekend.

It wants to convert you brainwaves and eye movements into useful electronic signals to communicate with electronic devices such as your phone or PC.

Forbes noticed this company last year, mentioning NeuroSky’s development of a way to control your phone using thought. And there’s an interesting post here which explains a bit more how it works. Basically, it has developed a non-invasive neural sensor and signal processing technology.

Part of the way it works is through biofeedback —

…training yourself to change the frequency of your brainwaves. For decades, people have been controlling their brainwaves using biofeedback monitors. By attaching electrodes to your scalp and looking at a realtime display of your brain activity, you can learn to change the…

frequency at will.

The other part of the answer is EOG (Electro-oculogram), or eye movement. While this isn’t really using your mind to control the device, it is a fairly automatic way to generate a small electrical signal that NeuroSky’s system can measure. The company says it has acquired proprietary algorithms originally developed in Russia that can covert and combine EEG and EOG signals into direction control…

We see the company received $1 million from investors some time ago, and that in June it was out trying to raise another $3 to $5 million in financing — though we haven’t heard any news of whether it succeeded. At the time, it had 17 employees, and had a development effort in Russia.

Caution: We haven’t seen any evidence this works.