NASA partners with Edison Nation to promote MindShift.
Press Release Summary:
NASA Langley Research Center is working with Edison Nation, an open innovation online service, to help distribute its discoveries and patents. Edison Nation will target companies that can license and use NASA technology, beginning with Langley's MindShift. Mimicking reality, this training and entertainment technology is based on research intended for pilots and air traffic controllers to use brainwave activity to maintain safer flight during autopilot and other automated aircraft functions.
Original Press Release:
NASA Partners with Edison Nation to Promote MindShift Technology
HAMPTON, Va., -- With thousands of technologies to share with industry and the public, NASA is looking to an Internet company to help get the word out.
NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is working with Edison Nation, an open innovation online service, to help distribute its discoveries and patents.
By law, federal agencies are required to have a technology transfer program to promote commercial activity, economic growth and innovation in business and commerce. Edison Nation will target companies that can immediately license and use NASA technology, beginning with Langley's MindShift.
MindShift is both training and entertainment technology that mimics reality. NASA Langley researchers Alan Pope and Chad Stephens invented the technology based on their research intended for pilots and air traffic controllers to use brainwave activity to maintain safer flight during autopilot and other automated aircraft functions.
If a user's physiological signals indicate that they are not in an optimal performance state, MindShift alters the speed, strength or steadiness of their controller. In this way, MindShift provides an additional skill challenge in videogames, as well as an incentive to learn physiological control in any computer-based task. In one example, a distracted or stressed video game player is aiming at crosshairs that is moving on the screen even though they are holding their controller steady.
Using biofeedback software and technology, players are able to modify their concentration and stress levels via physiological indicators to steady their aim displayed in the game.
"We're hoping our collaboration with Edison Nation will showcase the unique, commercial potential of MindShift and other NASA spinoff technologies," said Keith Belvin, chief technologist at NASA Langley. "Any time technology transfer places innovation into the hands of industry partners, we're helping to develop products for the benefit of the public."
Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Edison Nation helps get product ideas from independent inventors onto retail shelves. In addition to NASA, Edison Nation partners with major U.S. retailers and manufacturers and hosts open product searches for its members to submit ideas.
NASA's Technology Transfer Program, managed by the Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, ensures technologies developed for exploration and discovery missions are broadly available to the public.
To access the software catalog, and for more information on NASA's Tech Transfer program, visit:
http://technology.nasa.gov/
http://technologygateway.nasa.gov/
For more information about Edison Nation, go to: www.EdisonNation.com.
CONTACT: Chris Rink, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va., 757-864-6786, chris.rink@nasa.gov
Web Site: http://www.nasa.gov
