Monitor the mental workload in your brain

 

This particular paper has echoes of a whole lot of science fiction stories and novels, ranging from the utopian to the dystopian (but a lot more of the latter).  

Essentially, it's about an electronic sticker (which they call an e-tattoo) that can be placed right on the forehead to make it possible to monitor the brain's electrical activity, via the techniques of electroencephalography (EEG) and electrooculography (EOG).  If you're wondering about the latter, it's monitoring the eye's activity, including blinks and tracking movements (technically called saccades).

By doing this, they can monitor the brain activity of the subject(s) wearing the e-tattoo and estimate their mental workload.  At the most basic level, it's very cool that they can do this without having a really big machine or machines to do it. 

At the level of practical implementation, if this is determined to be reliable, this could be really good for people working tasks or jobs that are high stress, which would intuitively be expected to cause a high mental workload.  If the mental workload is high over an extended period of time, this can result in fatigue, errors of judgment/mistakes, and loss of productivity.  So knowing that's happening could allow intervention -- giving someone a break, changing shifts, or rotating between high- and lower-stress tasks. So it could be good.

On the other hand, using such technology routinely could be very intrusive. Employers could monitor employees to make sure their mental workload is high enough, so that they are being efficient and productive.  If the system shows too many low mental workload periods, that could mean that they aren't engaged and paying attention.  Maybe they should be, or maybe they just work better that way. But it would also cause stress if a worker thinks (ha) that their monitor is observing that they aren't mentally working hard enough.  And given the burgeoning potential of AI, monitoring brain activity and what tasks correspond to patterns of activity might even indicate what people are thinking about, not only how hard they're thinking.

So yeah, it's very cool that it can be done, but is it altogether a good thing that it can be?

Reference: A wireless forehead e-tattoo for mental workload estimation
Huh, Heeyong et al. Device, Volume 3, Issue 8, August 15, 2025, DOI:10.1016/j.device.2025.100781

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