The last year have seen a number of wearable devices emerge on the market to help our athletic performances. Most of these have been very much geared towards improving our physical prowess, with the latest deploying AI to give real-time ‘coaching’ to prod our efforts in the right direction.
Of course, as anyone that does sport to any degree will tell you, performance is as much a mental thing as it is physical, so a new headset technology will undoubtedly be of interest to professional and amateur athletes alike.
Brain training
A new company, called Halo Neuroscience, aims to tap into our brain via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). The product works on the belief that a mild electrical stimulant can make the brain more or less active, thus improving its ability to process information.
The company’s Halo Sport headset claims to prime our brain, thus untapping an array of boosts in “strength, explosiveness and dexterity”. The makers believe that the artificial stimulation will strengthen connections in our brain in much the same was as training and practice does.
Alas, at the moment there is little actual evidence that this works, with some going as far as suggesting that it could make things worse rather than better.
Halo have published a small amount of data on their website, and unsurprisingly all of these are supportive of their claims, but despite recently securing $9 million in venture capital it would seem that the jury is still very much out, especially as researchers have largely been very sceptical about the claims being made.
More work needed
Just as we generally require a great deal of work to improve our athletic performances, it would seem that much more study is required to determine whether tDCS can provide a noticeable boost to athletic performance across a range of motions in real-world settings.
That’s not to say that it won’t ever be able to reliably claim such performance enhancement capabilities, but it is very risky to do so right now. Hopefully more rigorous study will be undertaken to test things one way or the other.
