code, strategy

Clara is a brain-sensing, environment-augmenting, focus-enhancing lamp. It’s designed to help you optimize first for expansive creativity, and then for homing in on and concentrating on a singular idea.

The ambient lighting it provides slowly shifts color temperature as you begin to focus on a project, to enhance your concentration. It subtly shifts from a warm, 2700k light (like the light provided by an incandescent bulb) to a cool, “full-spectrum” 6500k light (like the light provided by a light box). The lamp also includes an embedded speaker playing soft ambient music, which slowly increases in volume as your concentration increases, helping to blanket your environment and reduce external distractions.

Clara uses an Arduino with Adafruit Neopixels and a Bluetooth-connected Neurosky MindWave Mobile EEG headset to measure your attentiveness and respond accordingly.

A technical writeup is available here. Clara was developed with Belen Tenorio and Marcelo Mejía Cobo.