Chinese primary school stops using headbands to study pupils’ concentration levels after public outcry
- Maker BrainCo defends use of devices on pupils in Zhejiang and insists they were not designed to monitor children’s brains
A company that developed a headband to monitor children’s attention spans has defended their use after a public outcry forced a primary school to stop using them.
Zhejiang BrainCo Technology, a company with offices in China and the US, said on Thursday that people had misinterpreted a report about the product that had appeared in The Wall Street Journal last week.
The report said pupils from Xiaoshun Township Central Primary School in Jinhua, a city in Zhejiang province, had been wearing the headband to measure electric signals from the neurons and translated that into an attention score.
But BrainCo’s statement said the product, Focus 1, aimed to help improve concentration, not to monitor children’s brain waves.
The primary school has since halted their use after an overwhelming wave of criticism on state and social media.