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My headset is reading my mind and talking behind my back

'A virgin? In his right ear, perhaps'

Something for the Weekend, Sir? It only takes a minute to capture a 3D model of my orifices. They tell me it’s the only way I can be sure of a tight fit.

Perhaps I could order a hologram of my 3D orifices that I can hang on my living room wall. It would make a nice conversation piece for visitors to admire.

"Isn’t it creepy how my orifices seem to follow you around the room!" I’ll exclaim, to which my nervous visitors will readily agree as they clutch their teacups in white-knuckled hands.

Why would I want a 3D model of my orifices, you ask? Well, how else do you think am I going to get earbuds perfectly moulded to my ears?

Not just noise-cancelling buds, either, but smart ones. These Bluetooth audio gadgets would not only be comfortable but they’d be clever.

After my grudging admission last week that fitness smartwatches can be more than faddish tat after all, it was brought to my attention that a great deal of parallel development continues to be directed at wearables other than those strapped to one’s wrist.

Still glowing with smugness at my weight-loss achievement to date, I was approached by a nice company which offered to let me try out their in-sole sensors to help me relearn good posture when going running. Unfortunately, the kind offer has not been followed up with anything so pedestrian as an actual product.

Indeed, it turned out to be a crowdfunded project which, in my experience, probably means it never existed except in the mind of a tech startup entrepreneur – a class of businessman we used to call “an incompetent serial failure”.

But that’s OK, because repeatedly failing is now supposed to be such a positive thing in tech startup culture that investors rate it more highly than success, profit or ROI.

This helps explain why neither you nor I are billionaires.

Anyway, back to my orifices. It turns out that another successfully crowdfunded project managed to give a leg-up to an apparently real company called United Sciences to begin manufacturing an apparently real product called Aware.

After capturing a 3D model of your outer ear canals, the company then 3D-prints a custom-fit pair of Bluetooth audio earbuds that also happen to track (they claim) brainwaves, heart rate, steps, distance travelled and calories burned along with, they add mysteriously, "other information".

What do they intend doing with my brainwaves?

As my father, a clinical psychiatrist, used to point out, detecting brainwaves with any EEG device is a bit like a blind man detecting when the sun is shining: it can be done but don’t expect a detailed 48-hour weather forecast. All that stuff about distinguishing individual thoughts and that cinematic cliché of turning dreams into a video stream remains the realm of sci-fi.

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And yet I learn that researchers at Silicon Valley mindf*ck experts Neurosky have developed a headset that detects detailed brain activity along with software that interprets it. The aim is to be able to use this interpretation to allow users to control matter by thought.

Spooky... except we’re not talking telekinesis.

So far, they have found it possible to train people to conceptualise a few basic “mental gestures” that the headset can recognise amid all that EEG noise.

A mental gesture might be a simple tune someone can sing in their head or the visualisation of a rolling cube. This recognised pattern can then trigger an event on another connected device, such as make an RC toy car move forward or switch the lights on in a room.

I wish them well but forgive me for being suspicious of what still seem like outlandish claims. It’s not their fault. I blame all the other bullshit-mongers out there in the wonderful world of wearables.

My favourite among these at the moment is the Swanwick Sleep: a pair of yellow-tinted spectacles that are claimed to "burn fat" as you wear them, as endorsed by a string of gullible celebrities.

This outrageous bollocks is based on the now-commonplace theory that blue light from electronic displays keeps you awake at night. By compensating for this by wearing yellow-tinted plastic specs costing $89, you should fall asleep more quickly when you finally go to bed after a long evening’s solitary web browsing in Private mode.

And by getting a good night’s rest, experts say, you are statistically less likely to spend your waking hours stuffing your fat fucking face with cake and doughnuts.

There you go: fat-burning sunglasses. Now you have heard it all.

I’m not disputing the blue-light theory – because I don’t know any better – but yellow-tinted specs are hardly new. My brother-in-law bought a pair in the 1990s because a catalogue called Men’s Essentials told him it would enhance his vision while driving at night.

To this day, I fail to comprehend how anyone could be convinced that wearing sunglasses after dark helps you see better. All it does is make you look cool, as already famously demonstrated by the Blues Brothers a decade earlier.

Dabbsy wearing AdLens spectacles

Mind you, last year I tried a pair of yellow-tinted specs called AdLens, specifically designed for people who work at computer screens for long hours.

Bless 'em, but their glasses make you appear like a cross between Eric Morecombe and Dame Edna Everidge. It’s not a good look.

And if you already need prescription glasses to see what’s on your display, well, see for yourself...

Still, keep those wearables coming, I say. We may laugh now but one day we’ll be wondering how we ever managed to live without kneecap-controlled heating systems, fat-burning hats and nipple-tuned radios.

Besides, wearables are harmless, right?

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Alistair DabbsAlistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He wishes to thank everyone who offered advice last week on how he was going about losing weight in completely the wrong way. They may be disappointed to learn that Alisair lost another kilo since then by continuing to do it incorrectly. 11kg so far...

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