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Using Your Thought-Controlled iPhone to Dial Home


No, this isn’t SF technology from the latest episode of Caprica (although the smart phones in Caprica look suspiciously like our own). A new iPhone app described in the MIT Technology Review blog developed by Tanzeem Choudhury, Rajeev Raizada, Andrew Campbell and others at Dartmouth College lets you “wink” or “think dial” your relative or friend when his or her photo appears on an iPhone. Dubbed the “NeuroPhone” (not to be confused with the “Neurophone” developed by Dr. Patrick Flanagan in 1958, a device that converts sound to electrical impulses) it’s a brainwave-phone interface that uses a wireless EEG headset to send signals wirelessly to an iPhone. Here’s a video demo of the NeuroPhone:

The “telepathic” headset is actually the Emotiv EPOC, which recently won the 2010 Red Dot Award for Product Design out of a field of 4,252 entries from 1,636 companies in 57 countries. While the wireless Emotiv EPOC headset is being marketed as both a gaming device and as an aid for the disabled, it clearly has the capability for hands-free smart phone use. With 14 EEG electrodes to monitor brainwaves and a gyroscope to locate your head in 3D space, its lithium battery lasts 12 hours and charges via USB. In addition the EPOC can read brain activity related to facial movements, which can be translated in software to infer your emotional state and intentions. The EPOC headset can also provide vegetative patients a way to communicate, let users play hands-free video games, and allow robot owners to send instructions to their bots.

Emotiv headset

If brainwave signals can be plucked out of the air to get the mood of a space, then brainwaves can be hacked.

The Dartmouth research that resulted in the NeruoPhone is based on pattern-based fMRI analysis (also referred to as multivoxel pattern analysis, or MVPA) which applies pattern-classification algorithms to analyze the voxels – essentially 3D pixels – in a brain scan. The Dartmouth researchers envision futuristic, somewhat scary, many-to-one mobile applications for the NeuroPhone. In one example, a foreign language teacher is interested in seeing exactly how many students — all wearing EEG headsets — actually understood the last question she asked. She pulls out her smart phone to get up-to-the-second statistics on each of her students. Based on aggregate class statistics, she determines student comprehension in real time… oops, they didn’t quite get that one. Another even more futuristic and somewhat invasive example involves a person entering a bar, club, meeting room and immediately getting the brainwave “vibe” of the overall emotional state of the humans in the space (happy, tense, frustrated, sad, bored, hostile, and so forth).

INeurophone. Photo: brainwave signals can be plucked out of the air to get the mood of a space, then brainwaves can be hacked. Just as today’s hackers “sniff” packets of information passing between computers on the Internet, tomorrow’s hackers may have the ability to sniff brainwave packets out of the air to reconstruct thoughts. The term “firewall” will definitely take on a new meaning.

While you probably won’t want to walk around wearing an EPOC, you can bet the form factor will look more like a Bluetooth headset in a year or two. The NeuroPhone is an important development because it is simple to engineer using cheap off-the-shelf commercial components. And the Dartmouth iPhone app is exciting for two reasons: it is the first sensible iPhone application for the EPOC headset; and you don’t have to mess with the touch screen to dial the phone. Today’s machine learning algorithms are now able to interface neural signals to phones to deliver a new mobile computing experience. Soon you’ll be thinking your way through your iPhone or Droid apps.


  1. ok I get it but did you know you can hack it? I found some iphone hacks @

  2. This would truly be awesome. You could detect people’s feelings during huge conferences and meetings. You could also determine their feelings and thoughts. It sounds almost creepy but can be dangerously manipulative.
    Meeting Rooms Peterborough

  3. Useless. That’s the trap of BCI: people get excited over the “mind control” connotations of BCI to see that it’s not a qualitatively different tool than anything else, and is not good at everything. I’m certain that some good stuff’s coming though…

  4. The research uses EEG data not fMRI.

  5. Remote neural monitoring is here and in use by the intelligence agencies, for years now. As is technological mind control.

    You might say people with my experiences are crazy, but what kind of mental illness goes away when you put on a steel hat?

  6. Dear @Sir, @Madam,
    Thank you!
    Yours sincerely.

  7. Dr. Jose Del Gato was doing mind control in primates more than 40 years ago. The chip had not been invented and a computer we would call a mere toy today was so large it occupied a two story building. RFID bugging devices are now the size of a grain of rice. Wherever power exists there will be someone to exploit it.


    A gift to Asperger’s sufferers everywhere.

    “Oh, this thing? It lets me see through your clothes.”

  9. And why hasn’t someone hooked a BCI into this for a BCI that can remotely play with a cube through a phone? I would if I had a newer phone, but I’m still on way old school cell phone. :) As to the asperger’s comment I love it, it made me laugh :)

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