Mom may not like that tattoo on your upper arm, but at least you can cover it up with a shirt. So what do you think she’d say about a tattoo on your forehead?
Cool! After all, it isn’t just any tattoo. It’s more like a mood ring for your forehead. It doesn’t just decorate, it elucidates your mental state.
Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, are the creators of this forehead tattoo. The device adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo and monitors brain signals and eye movements to gauge mental strain. A machine-learning algorithm uses that information to determine whether the wearer is in a low or high mental-load state.
The Texas scientists speculated that their device might one day help pilots, surgeons, race-car drivers, and military personnel stay sharp under pressure. Nanshu Lu, a biomedical engineer at UT-Austin who co-led development of the forehead sensor, commented, “In those kinds of high-stakes, high-demand tasks, we could have real-time monitoring and decoding of mental workloads.”
Similar devices attached to the chest have been used to monitor cardiac activity. But the Texas device is the first to be used on the forehead.
In lab tests, volunteers performed memory and arithmetic tasks while wearing the forehead tattoo. The device reliably distinguished moments of mental ease from periods of strain, and it maintained accuracy even as participants moved their heads and blinked, underscoring the device’s potential for use in dynamic, real-world settings like operating rooms or cockpits.
Dmitry Kireev, a bioelectronics researcher from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has written about e-tattoo sensors, commented, “I very much like that this face tattoo measures a variety of biomarkers.” He added, “It’s something I would try. The shape and form is kind of cool.”
Cool enough even for Mom?