Came across this today, thought it might make an interesting topic for discussion. I've had a quick search around these forums and drawn a blank, and while my memory is terrible I don't recall it being discussed on the show either. Seems plausible in some senses, over-reaching in others but could be perfectly valid or complete hokum - my guess is it's probably somewhere in between.
Melon -
http://kck.st/13uYmbQ - a nicely designed Kickstarter project currently well on it's way to raising 100K. In summary it's a headband that monitors brainwaves and passes them to an iOS app where they're used to represent how 'focussed' you are on whatever it is your doing, the idea being you can then do more of what helps focus you and less of what doesn't.
On the surface I suppose it's not too far fetched and and a quick Google finds a bunch of similar products on the market claiming various things from just allowing you to monitor brain activity to more proactive claims like 'brain training' or 'sleep improvement' etc. - so I can imagine the tech to reliably capture the EEG data in a small consumer-friendly device is probably here.
What I'm not so sure about is whether a pretty vaguely defined thing like 'focus' can be improved by an app that displays this information as a graph. Good information design can condense a lot of complex data into an easily digestible format but can electrical activity picked up by one of these bands be reliably displayed as a measure of 'focus' in any meaningful way - ie; the wavy line goes up you're focussed, it goes down and you're distracted - is it really that simple? It seems that evaluating it's efficacy could be prone to confirmation bias too. The founders of the company seem genuine enough though, and claim seemingly appropriate backgrounds, which is a start I suppose.
A bigger question is who would want to wear one, particularly
'at a bar' or
'with other people' as the UI screenshots suggest - maybe it'll compliment your Google Glass and bluetooth earpeice…
