Hey everyone! Hope you're all well.
I just want to make a note here that if you are training with my device whether successfully or unsuccessfully, I want your stories! Email me at hegalpha@gmail.com. This is still an emerging biofeedback technology and as such lacks much in the way of clinical data. One way to encourage valid clinical trials however is with a lot of powerful and consistent anecdotes - and it will help someone like me apply for grants and get involved with non-profits and clinics who are not familiar with this technology. I am trying to get this out to people who need it, and better exposing the effectiveness of this technology and accompanying therapies it's used for will go a long ways, especially considering the positive results I've heard from several people using my tech now, as well as what I have read in journals.
One of my problems I've made for myself has been to constantly work on better synthesis of all of the information I have access to so I can deliver a useful and intuitive internal model that you can have in your head about your own and others' mental health, to go with the use of the device. I'm getting there! The hardware needs some perspective to make the best use of it as it is a powerful psychotherapeutic conditioning tool when wielded properly. If more of us have accurate, up to date, intuitive understandings of brain health it will go a very long ways for long term stress reduction and in the way we gain awareness of ourselves, and help each other developmentally. Our brains are highly complex tools - one of the most complex and highly developed things in the universe - evolved through countless millennia, and we are born completely ignorant of it. It stands that we have to learn about it and how to use it if we aren't going to neglect it and even strengthen it beyond its typical capacities, just as all of our other languages and technologies for interacting with our world have advanced so much in recent history and allowed so much more possibility in all our lives. This is another thing I can improve by seeing what others are thinking and doing so I can better tune my language and actually resonate with people.
I also eventually want to talk about building a wider co-operative movement (I'm a big believer in worker/engineer/research co-operatives and providing important infrastructure services specifically to benefit our communities more than our pockets) but I need more people to engage with me on that subject - quit being shy! The future will be here a lot quicker if we all get a little more sociable and committed to our ideals, and put our heads and resources together in very practical ways.
In other news,
I'm excited to ship out my first HEGduino V2 orders beginning today and filling out all of my first orders over the next several days. I had a limited run of 60 devices this go around so new orders have to wait until December now for more stock.
I've also been learning more about tomography and interferometry. You might not know this but you can take the basic sensors I'm using and array more LEDs and Photodiodes together, so that you can build 2D and even 3D reconstructions of cortical activity to a certain depth (1 to 2 inches). There are tricks with optics and a few pages from geoscience we can take to make it a system that can be tuned and reach even deeper depths. We're talking true holographic human imaging with safe visible and infrared light - check out stuff like OCT scanning and Fast Optical Signal. Now, can I do any of that stuff myself? Well, uh, give me some time. I have all of the hardware available to me right now to repeat this study of mapping visual cortex activity: https://www.pnas.org/content/104/29/12169 BUT we're talking real hard math. Luckily Kyle Mathewson at a lab in Toronto made his code for it available to me which performs this task but god knows if I'll figure out how to use it correctly.
BTW. Here's a whole drive dump of HEG case studies, related physiology, and tech reviews - including a few papers I scanned up from Hershel and Marjorie Toomim (I need to scan the rest up still, they have a lot of valuable information): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19ZAg42HOSXGMMqi9X7QMG7_t3wQrssV2?usp=sharing
The About page contains a bunch of links too. The information is all there to give you a comprehensive understanding of the field of FNIRS and brain blood flow as it relates to well being.
Cheers!
Thank you for the update I have been waiting for this launch for 6 months now Are you shipping ready-to-use product now?