Consumer / wearable EEG headset

A self-applied, wireless, usually few-channel EEG device sold outside the clinical channel — headbands, earbuds, or gaming headsets aimed at meditation, focus training, sleep, or novelty control. They share a common design envelope: dry electrodes, a handful of channels (often one to a few dozen), on-board amplification and Bluetooth streaming, and a phone app that turns raw signal into a friendly score. Open-hardware platforms sit alongside the closed commercial ones and expose the full data stream for research.

As instruments they are legitimate and improving; the honesty problem is in interpretation. A device that reliably measures frontal EEG can still make marketing claims about attention, emotion, or cognitive enhancement that its two frontal channels cannot support. The recorded signal is heavily shaped by eye movement, jaw and facial muscle, and contact quality, so an app that reports a rising focus score may be tracking how still the user sat, not a mental state.