Brain Wearables Will Know When Workers Are Losing Focus

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0:35The versatile Equinox tackles your entire day. The spacious Traverse fits your crew and your whole weekend. And Trax brings style with value you can count on. All infused with tech that has your back. So your drive always hits the right chord. Chevrolet. Together let's drive. Okay, so this is a beta product. They're partnering with a major headphone maker. And the idea is to just pack the, you know, soft cushiony ear pieces that you would ordinarily use with sensors that can detect brain activity. Their hope is to be able to help people measure attention and focus. So some of the beta software that we're going to look at enables me to do some tasks to see how well I switched between tasks, but also to see how attention can actually be tracked and monitored through headsets that you would use to listen to music or do a conference call.

1:33So here are some data. What we're seeing here is we're seeing my focus levels while I was doing the task. When you see these dips, these dips show moments that I was distracted and I started to get a little bit bored and I started to think about what I was going to make for dinner. And And then you see the peaks when I'm reengaged. And that's pretty remarkable that you can actually just pick up that brain data and actually see like, that's the moment.

2:01Okay, so this device you can see is not something that you're definitely going to wear every day. So this one just goes over the head like this. Probably about a decade ago, I started to track some of the companies that are using wearable brain sensors in the workplace. I think it's just extraordinary for people the first time they realize that the inner workings of their own mind that they have always just assumed was this black box that nobody else could access suddenly could be connected to a simple consumer-based device. I think that's something a lot of people are going to encounter for the first time in the coming months and years.

2:40It's important for me to remember that novelty, but also just the shock and and in some ways discomfort of the realization that we can decode what's happening inside the brain. Each of these are dry electrodes, but we'll start by turning it on. By wearing one of these devices, you can actually visualize different brain activity through a program called brain visualization, seeing while I'm talking, right, the different areas of the brain lighting up. And those are patterns that can ultimately be decoded to at least tell us a number of simple things about the cognitive and effective states of individuals.

3:20Our brain activity, particularly the electrical activity in our brains, can be tracked just like our heart rate or steps or biometric information from our bodies. Most people have heard of EEG when it's used in a clinical setting or a hospital, and it looks very sci-fi or futuristic. What's extraordinary is moving from that clinical grade kind of experience to smaller and smaller and fewer and fewer sensors that could be put into, for example, a hard hat. So what can these devices measure? You can pick up basic cognitive and affective states.

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4:37Nita Farahany:Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Is a person happy or sad? Are they angry? Is a person tired? Is a person alert? Are they paying attention or is their mind wandering? Increasingly, there's evidence that you can start to tell what kind of task a person is paying attention to. So are they working on coding? Are they working on documentation? Are they working on an unrelated task like surfing social media? A question that I get a lot and a fear that a lot of people express is that an employer or another person or the government will be able to read people's minds with this technology.

5:26Maybe a decade ago I would have said no that's never gonna happen. Now I would say it depends on what you mean by reading your mind. Can you literally decode every thought and every image that's in your mind with surface-based electrodes, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that that's going to ever happen. Can you decode a lot of information about what a person is thinking or feeling? And when you triangulate that with what they're working on on their computer screen and the information that you're already gathering from their phones and from their other devices that they're interacting with, can you paint a much more precise picture?

6:01Absolutely. This information is going to give more precise information about the cognitive and affective states of a person, including semblances of what they're thinking, even if it's not literally like a thought bubble that you're decoding. Already, there is a significant amount of surveillance that exists in the workplace. For factory workers tracking their movements on the factory floor, for white-collar workers, There's keystroke logging or during the pandemic, more than 80 % of companies said they either have already started doing remote monitoring of the workplace or they intend to do so.

6:38Are wearable brain sensors different in kind or just more of the same? When you start to veer into attention monitoring and start to collect richer data from which you can extract things like whether a person is paying attention to what they're looking at in the screen, I think it starts to be different in kind for a couple of reasons. One is most people, if you ask them where their sense of self is located, they point to the head. That's where most people identify their sense of self. And when you start putting sensors on the brain, the feeling of intrusiveness and invasiveness for an individual employee is much more profound.

7:17The second is what you actually potentially could discover for monitor and brain activity. In order to collect the information that extracts attention, you collect this wider array of brain activity, which if stored as the algorithms become more sophisticated, or even with existing algorithms could probe that information for more sensitive and deeply intimate information about an individual. Brainwave data that's being collected by a third party, whether it's a software, you know, company, the device manufacturer. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling?

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9:21It could be the kind of thing that eventually could be interrogated by others.

9:28So most of us are distracted much of the day. With so many different distractions in the workplace, a lot of people are trying to focus on how can they improve their focus? How can they improve their productivity? That turns out to be something that neurotechnology can help with as well. You can wear these devices that help you see what your attention and focus levels look like. The technology in the hands of an employee can be empowering. There's the potential, of course, and we're already seeing this in some settings in other countries, where the devices could be mandated to watch a person's attention, watch their focus, and then make choices either at a managerial level to say, for example, know this division can't work from home anymore because it turns out that their attention and productivity levels are much worse, or to make decisions about hiring or firing or promotion based on the brain metrics that they're seeing.

10:30I think that employees are going to increasingly be in the position of being faced with the option, if not requirement to wear brain wearables in the workplace. Except for a few jurisdictions in the United States that have biometric-based laws, an employer could decide that all employees have to wear these devices in the workplace. One thing I think is really important for employers is to realize that people are kind of freaked out by the possibility. That's why it's so important for employers to ethically implement and a use of neurotechnology in the workplace in a way that's empowering rather than oppressive for employees.

11:09What I recommend is that as a starting place, we recognize a right to cognitive liberty, which includes a right to mental privacy for employees. And even in the absence of that, I believe employers should act as if employees have a right to mental privacy and therefore only seek information for which there is a bona fide legal exception to that, a need for the data as an exception to the right to mental privacy. Next, when appropriate, employers should offer employees the opportunity to use neurotech devices or brain wearables in the workplace in order to monitor their own stress, fatigue, attention levels, and to improve their workplace environment.

11:51It's also incredibly important for employers to be transparent about what the purposes for the use of brain wearables in the workplace, not just the fine print in the handbook for the employees, but being incredibly clear about the purpose of introducing it, what data is being collected, how that data will be used, as well as giving employees insight and opportunities to audit and see the data that's being collected or used, how it's being used in any context or in any setting. Perhaps the most important thing is to make sure that whatever data is collected by brain wearables is stored on device rather than on cloud servers or on device manufacturers, websites, or software.

12:38The reason for this is to ensure that employees know that the data isn't being mined for other purposes. There may be exceptions to this. It could be that employees consent to the use of data for aggregate information that can improve their well-being But we should prefer, if not demand, that that data be kept private on device for employees. If it's done in that way, that is as something to help employees and not something that's another tool of surveillance, it has the potential to be transformative for people's health and for people's lives. If it's used as another tool of surveillance, it could be seen as the most oppressive kind of technology that's been introduced into the workplace.

13:22Thank you.