First of all who is DAQRI? They’re a Los Ange­les-based start­up that cre­at­ed the DAQRI Smart Safe­ty Hel­met for blue col­lar work­ers. Their site states “every aspect of DAQRI Smart Hel­met was designed with the indus­tri­al work place in mind, from its advanced sen­sor pack­age to the intu­itive user inter­face that requires zero cal­i­bra­tion, to the bat­tery life that lasts an entire shift”. It’s a wear­able aug­ment­ed real­i­ty tool basically.

DAQRI claims that the hel­met has more com­put­ing pow­er than any oth­er wear­able device, sport­ing a cou­ple of Qual­comm Snap­drag­on proces­sors. The com­pa­ny has devel­oped their own cus­tom soft­ware called Intel­li­Track that over­lays aug­ment­ed data onto real-world sur­faces in real-time. There are sen­sors that wrap around this device that afford a 360 degree field of vision with HD video and pho­tog­ra­phy and is sup­posed to oper­ate just fine in low light.

Bri­an Mullins, the CEO of DAQRI has recent­ly stat­ed they plan on acquir­ing the start-up Mel­on and want to now inte­grate the Mel­on head­band into their smart hel­met. The acqui­si­tion is in hope that more busi­ness­es will buy DAQRI’s prod­uct, as they can now get addi­tion­al ben­e­fit of the Mel­on headband.

So what is Mel­on? Back in 2013 this com­pa­ny had raised triple its fund­ing goal in a Kick­starter crowd­fund­ing cam­paign In a nut­shell, this is a brain­wave mon­i­tor­ing head­band or more com­mon­ly known as an EEG in the med­ical and sci­ence fields. This device inter­prets your elec­tri­cal activ­i­ty your brain nat­u­ral­ly puts out. The device uses Blue­tooth to wire­less­ly trans­mit data to your phone, thus allow­ing you to keep track and train your cog­ni­tive states. The head­band has an adjusta­bil­i­ty designed in to fit most heads age 10 and up.

Mel­on cre­ates a vari­ety of games based on the prin­ci­ples of neu­ro­science to help improve skills like focus, and stress man­age­ment. It allows you to save all your thought data to see how you’ve been devel­op­ing emo­tion­al­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly. With the acqui­si­tion, the tech­nol­o­gy will become more advanced and will be able to mon­i­tor the stress lev­el, skin tem­per­a­ture, fatigue and heart rate of the users. Com­pa­nies could in the­o­ry now also mon­i­tor their employee’s over­all well­be­ing while on the job, there­by improv­ing work and safe­ty conditions.

Mullins stat­ed “the EEG space has imme­di­ate poten­tial to enhance 4D wear­ables with safe­ty fea­tures, as well as long term poten­tial to cre­ate a game-chang­ing brain-com­put­er inter­face that will allow you to con­trol 4D inter­faces and objects in the real world. We have been work­ing with EEG tech­nol­o­gy in con­junc­tion with aug­ment­ed real­i­ty for sev­er­al years and it was clear that the Mel­on team was real­ly push­ing the lim­its of what was pos­si­ble today, and in the future.”

The Mel­on CEO, Arye Barne­hama, said “We built Mel­on to empow­er peo­ple with infor­ma­tion about their bod­ies that was not pre­vi­ous­ly avail­able out­side of research labs or hos­pi­tals. Join­ing DAQRI will allow us to inte­grate our wear­able sen­sors into prod­ucts that will improve the lives of indus­tri­al work­ers, mak­ing them safer and health­i­er, by per­son­al­iz­ing tech­nol­o­gy to their biol­o­gy.” Now don’t think that the Mel­on head­band is just going to dis­ap­pear inside this hel­met, Mel­on is going to con­tin­ue to cre­ate a com­mer­cial con­sumer prod­uct and is devel­op­ing their sec­ond gen­er­a­tion of head­band with greater mind read­ing capability.

So now you’ll be play­ing with all sorts of mind pow­ers you nev­er knew you had. My per­son­al opin­ion, match made in heav­en. Poten­tial for the media world in terms of mar­ket research using a mel­on head­band – unlim­it­ed, think about employ­ment pos­si­bil­i­ties in an indus­try of the mind.