Consumer neurotechnology

Consumer neurotechnology comprises brain-sensing devices sold directly to the public: EEG headbands for meditation and sleep, focus trackers, and rudimentary control gadgets. Technically they are constrained versions of research wearables, with few dry channels, heavy on-device filtering, and simple outputs (a relaxation score, a binary command), often derived from band-power features that are only loosely specific to the advertised mental state.

Two cautions dominate. Scientifically, the gap between a validated laboratory measure and a consumer metric is often large and rarely disclosed, so a marketed construct such as attention or calm may not be what the device actually measures. Ethically and legally, these products collect neural data outside medical-privacy frameworks, raising the mental-privacy and governance concerns that motivate neurorights; a device need not be accurate to create a data-governance problem.