Taking the concept of hands-free to a new level

The Neurocam is the latest in a growing line of products from Neurowear, the Tokyo-based company that has tasked itself with creating products and services that are built around biological signals such as a person's heartbeat or brainwave activity.

The Neurocam allows the wearer to operate a smartphone with nothing more than brainwaves.

Yes, it may look odd, but the prototype wasn't developed for the catwalk, it was built to show how brainwave activity can be analyzed and translated into the ultimate electronic device remote control.

The Neurocam is the latest in a growing line of products from Neurowear, the Tokyo-based company that has tasked itself with creating products and services that are built around biological signals such as a person's heartbeat or brainwave activity.

Receiving its first public demonstration at the Human Sensing 2013 conference, the Neurocam is a brainwave-reading Alice band with a smartphone handset fixed to one side which translates a person's interest levels into smartphone camera commands. If the wearer's interest is piqued by something he or she is looking at -- i.e., if it scores more than 60 on a scale of 1-100 -- then the attached smartphone's camera will automatically start filming.

The phone is fixed to the headband for two reasons -- firstly to transfer the commands instantaneously; and secondly to ensure that the device is capturing exactly what the wearer is looking at. For this reason, the prototype also uses a prism so that the image passes to the lens, otherwise the camera would be filming the side of the wearer's head.

According to DigiInfo, Neurowear sees the Neurocam as a first step towards a number of products, including a true life-logging camera that captures stills and moving images when the wearer feels an emotional response to something.